A comprehensive HTTP client library, httplib2 supports many features left out of other HTTP libraries.

HTTP and HTTPS HTTPS support is only available if the socket module was compiled with SSL support.

Keep-Alive Supports HTTP 1.1 Keep-Alive, keeping the socket open and performing multiple requests over the same connection if possible.

Authentication The following three types of HTTP Authentication are supported. These can be used over both HTTP and HTTPS.

• Digest
• Basic
• WSSE

Caching The module can optionally operate with a private cache that understands the Cache-Control: header and uses both the ETag and Last-Modified cache validators. Both file system and memcached based caches are supported.

All Methods The module can handle any HTTP request method, not just GET and POST.

Redirects Automatically follows 3XX redirects on GETs.

Compression Handles both 'deflate' and 'gzip' types of compression.

Lost update support Automatically adds back ETags into PUT requests to resources we have already cached. This implements Section 3.2 of Detecting the Lost Update Problem Using Unreserved Checkout

Unit Tested A large and growing set of unit tests.