pycurlvshttpclient
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.
HTTPClient is a Ruby gem that provides a simple and flexible interface for making HTTP requests. It's a full-featured HTTP client library with support for cookies, redirects, proxy, and more. It's built on top of the libwww-perl library, which is a widely-used, robust and well-documented library.
Features:
- methods like GET/HEAD/POST/* via HTTP/1.1.
- HTTPS(SSL), Cookies, proxy, authentication(Digest, NTLM, Basic), etc.
- asynchronous HTTP request, streaming HTTP request.
- debug mode CLI.
- by contrast with net/http in standard distribution;
- Cookies support
- MT-safe
- streaming POST (POST with File/IO)
- Digest auth
- Negotiate/NTLM auth for WWW-Authenticate (requires net/ntlm module; rubyntlm gem)
- NTLM auth for Proxy-Authenticate (requires 'win32/sspi' module; rubysspi gem)
- extensible with filter interface
- you don't have to care HTTP/1.1 persistent connection (httpclient cares instead of you)