Delicious API and urllib2

[Bill]

The delicious api requires http authorization (actually https). A
generic delicious api post url is "https://
username:password at api.api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/add?url=http://
example.com/&description=interesting&tags=whatever".

This works fine when entered in the Firefox address bar. However
urllib2.urlopen(delicious_post_url) chokes and returns
"httplib.InvalidURL: nonnumeric port: 'password at api.del.icio.us".

Delicious really wants that authorization stuff embedded in the url as
it also rejected my attempts at using urllib2.HTTPBasicAuthHandler(),
etc.
Anybody have any hints?