gotvspycurl

MIT - 10 14,897

140.4 million (month) Mar 27 2014 15.0.1(2026-04-08 16:15:35 ago)

1,147 10 6 LGPL-2.1

Feb 25 2003 5.2 million (month) 7.45.7(2025-09-24 13:35:56 ago)

Got is a lightweight and powerful HTTP client for Node.js. It is built on top of the http and https modules and provides a simple, consistent API for making HTTP requests.

Got is one of the most feature-rich http clients in NodeJS ecosystem offering http2, proxy and asynchronous support making it ideal for web scraping.

Got also supports many specific domain integrations like AWS, plugins for various public APIs like github.

Note that Got has some inconsistent behaviors when it comes to web scraping use.
For example, it normalizes http headers which is undesired functionality in scraping and should be disabled.

PycURL is a Python interface to libcurl, a multi-protocol file transfer library written in C. PycURL allows developers to use a variety of network protocols in their Python programs, including HTTP, FTP, SMTP, POP3, and many more.

PycURL is often used in web scraping, data analysis, and automation tasks, as it allows developers to send and receive data over the internet. It can be used to perform various types of requests, such as GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE, and can also handle file uploads and downloads, cookies, and redirects.

One of the key features of PycURL is its support for SSL and proxy servers, which allows developers to securely transfer data over the internet and work around any network restrictions. PycURL also supports a wide range of authentication methods, such as Basic, Digest, and NTLM, and allows developers to easily set custom headers and query parameters.

Just like cURL itself, PycURL is also highly configurable and allows for fine-grained control over various aspects of the transfer, such as timeouts, retries, buffer sizes, and verbosity levels. Additionally, PycURL also provides easy access to the underlying libcurl library, which allows developers to access advanced functionality that is not exposed by the PycURL API.

It's important to note that PycURL is a wrapper around the libcurl library and therefore provides the same functionality and performance as libcurl.

Main strengths of PycURL is that it uses cURL which is one of the most feature rich low-level http clients. The downside is that it's a very low-level client (see the examples below) with complex API making use in web scraping very difficult and niche.

Highlights

http2asyncpopularextendibletypescriptproxy

uses-curlhttp2multi-partresponse-streaminghttp-proxy

Example Use

```python const got = require('got'); // GET requests are default and can be made calling the module as is: const response = await got('https://api.example.com'); console.log(response.body); // POST requests can send const response = await got.post('https://api.example.com', { json: { name: 'John Doe' }, }); console.log(response.body); // handling cookies import {CookieJar} from 'tough-cookie'; const cookieJar = new CookieJar(); await cookieJar.setCookie('foo=bar', 'https://httpbin.org'); await got('https://httpbin.org/anything', {cookieJar}); // using proxy import got from 'got'; import {HttpsProxyAgent} from 'hpagent'; await got('https://httpbin.org/ip', { agent: { https: new HttpsProxyAgent({ keepAlive: true, keepAliveMsecs: 1000, maxSockets: 256, maxFreeSockets: 256, scheduling: 'lifo', proxy: 'https://localhost:8080' }) } }); ```

```python import pycurl from io import BytesIO buf = BytesIO() headers = BytesIO() c = pycurl.Curl() c.setopt(c.HTTP_VERSION, c.CURL_HTTP_VERSION_2_0) # set to use http2 # set proxy c.setopt(c.PROXY, 'http://proxy.example.com:8080') c.setopt(c.PROXYUSERNAME, 'username') c.setopt(c.PROXYPASSWORD, 'password') # make a request c.setopt(c.URL, 'https://httpbin.org/get') c.setopt(c.WRITEFUNCTION, buf.write) # where to save response body c.setopt(c.HEADERFUNCTION, headers.write) # where to save response headers # to make post request enable POST option: # c.setopt(c.POST, 1) # c.setopt(c.POSTFIELDS, 'key1=value1&key2=value2') c.perform() # send request # read response data = buf.getvalue().decode() headers = headers.getvalue().decode() # headers as a string headers = dict([h.split(': ') for h in headers.splitlines() if ': ' in h]) # headers as a dict c.close() # multiple concurrent requests can be made using CurlMulti object: # Create a CurlMulti object multi = pycurl.CurlMulti() # Set the number of maximum connections multi.setopt(pycurl.MAXCONNECTS, 5) # Create a list to store the Curl objects curls = [] # Add the first request c1 = pycurl.Curl() c1.setopt(c1.URL, 'https://httpbin.org/get') c1.setopt(c1.WRITEFUNCTION, BytesIO().write) multi.add_handle(c1) curls.append(c1) # Add the second request c2 = pycurl.Curl() c2.setopt(c2.URL, 'https://httpbin.org/') c2.setopt(c2.WRITEFUNCTION, BytesIO().write) multi.add_handle(c2) curls.append(c2) # Start the requests while True: ret, _ = multi.perform() if ret != pycurl.E_CALL_MULTI_PERFORM: break # Close the connections for c in curls: multi.remove_handle(c) c.close() ```

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