[Python-Dev] Adding resume (206) support to urllib(2)

[Fredrik Lundh]

Martin v. Löwis wrote:

>> given that urllib2 already supports partial requests, I'm not sure I see 
>> the point of reimplementing this on top of httplib.  an example:
>>
>>    import urllib2
>>
>>    request = urllib2.Request("http://www.pythonware.com/daily/index.htm")
>>    request.add_header("range", "bytes=0-999")
> 
> But what does this do if the URL was a file URL, or an ftp URL?

same thing as if you use range on a HTTP server that doesn't support
ranges.  you get all the data, and there's no content-range field in
the response header.

> You have to know the syntax of the range header, and you have to
> know the syntax of the content-range header, to process it. With
> that, you can just as easily use httplib:

I'm not sure "as easily" is the right way to describe something that 
requires more code but yet leaves out practical things as redirection 
support, host and user-agent headers, etc.

</F>