httpio

HTTP resources as random-access file-like objects

httpio is a small Python library that allows you to access files served over HTTP as file-like objects (which is to say that they support the interface of the standard library's BufferedIOBase class). It differs from libraries like urllib and requests in that it supports seek() (which moves an internal pointer), and that read() makes a request with the Range header set. It also supports caching of contents using a configurable block size, and will reuse TCP connections where possible.

Installation

Use pip to install httpio:

$ pip install httpio

Usage

import zipfile
import httpio

url = "http://some/large/file.zip"
with httpio.open(url) as fp:
    zf = zipfile.ZipFile(fp)
    print(zf.namelist())

Unit Tests

Unit tests are provided for the standard behaviours implemented by the library. They can be run with

$ python -m unittest discover -s tests

or a tox.ini file is provided which allows the tests to be run in virtual environments using the tox tool:

$ tox