Using win32Com with Internet Explorer

[David Fuess]

Now trhat I've had a day to think about it, I must respectfully
disagree. I think the one, and only, thing you can count on is the
Pyrhon libraries. The urllib has a FancyOpener that understands
proxies and is simple and stable. IE is neither simple nor stable
particularly as you never know what version will be installed on the
target machine. Further, httplib and htmllib give you complete control
over the decoding of the web pages.

I use the same code on Windows,  UNIX, and Macintosh systems. Neither
UNIX nor the Mac have IE, yet all were capable of retrieving and
decoding web pages with no changes in the code. If you write in COM
you are restricted to Windows platforms only.

Dave

On Mon, 19 Feb 2001 18:31:05 +0000, Toby Dickenson
<mbel44 at dial.pipex.net> wrote:

>David Fuess <fuess at att.net> wrote:
>
>>Pardon my directness, but isn't it rather foolish to go messing around
>>with IE and COM when Python provides libraries for this purpose. I've
>>implemented many crawlers using urllib, httplib, and htmllib to fetch,
>>parse, and follow URL threads.
>
>For many cases the IE-based code is better. For example, it uses IE's
>proxy configuration and local cache.
>
>If you need to redistribute a script to someone else, then a working
>IE configuration is probably something you can rely on.
>
>Toby Dickenson
>tdickenson at geminidataloggers.com