On Mon, 7 Mar 2005 14:43:01 -0600, Skip Montanaro <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> It seems to me that either urllib's docs are wrong or its code is wrong
> w.r.t. how the User-agent header is handled. In part, the docs say:
>
> By default, the URLopener class sends a User-Agent: header of
> "urllib/VVV", where VVV is the urllib version number. Applications can
> define their own User-Agent: header by subclassing URLopener or
> FancyURLopener and setting the instance attribute version to an
> appropriate string value before the open() method is called.
>
> Looking at the code it seems to me that the User-agent header is fixed at
> instantiation time:
>
> version = "Python-urllib/%s" % __version__
>
> # Constructor
> def __init__(self, proxies=None, **x509):
> ...
> self.addheaders = [('User-agent', self.version)]
> ...
>
> and that when open_http() is called, it simply calls putheader() for each
> element of addheaders. Setting the version instance attribute will have no
> effect. If I managed to add another User-agent header before open_http()
> was called, the request would wind up with two copies which is probably not
> desirable either.
>
> I can see a couple ways around this:
>
> * Just change the docs to match the current implementation. Users
> wishing to override the User-agent header would then have to subclass
> FancyURLopener and set the version class attribute.
>
> * Defer decisions about the value of the User-agent until open_http() is
> called.
>
> It appears the OpenerDirector class in urllib2 has a similar "early binding"
> problem.
>
> I don't particularly care how this is solved, but it appears to need
> solving.
Good catch. I propose fixing the docs; "fixing" the code after so many
year of being out of sync with the doc might cause more surprises.
(Unless you can find evidence in CVS that this *used* to work and
someone introduced an unfortunate optimization that disabled the
feature.)
--
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
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