I was debating whether this was truly a question for python-dev or if I should take it to one of the user lists. Ultimately it feels like a question about the implementation of a core module, so hopefully nobody minds me posting it here. :) Although not listed as a public API method in the documentation, it would seem the httplib.HTTPResponse.close method might be useful in the event we don't want to actually read any of the data being sent back from the server. If I'm to assume that an undocumented method is considered "private", currently the only way to force the underlying file-like socket wrapper to close is by calling read() until no more data remains (as per the documentation). What's the reasoning behind requiring callers to read() all the pending data vs. just closing the socket? Is the close method really off limits to code using HTTPResponse? Cheers, Tom