Question about the wording in the python documents.

[Emile van Sebille]

On 5/1/2009 1:02 PM grocery_stocker said...
> At the following url...
> 
> http://docs.python.org/library/urllib2.html
> 
> They have the following...
> 
> "urllib2.urlopen(url[, data][, timeout])
> 
>     Open the URL url, which can be either a string or a Request
> object"
> 
> I don't get how urllib2.urlopen() can take a Request object. When I do
> the following....
> 
> [cdalten at localhost ~]$ python
> Python 2.4.3 (#1, Oct  1 2006, 18:00:19)
> [GCC 4.1.1 20060928 (Red Hat 4.1.1-28)] on linux2
> Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>> import urllib2
>>>>
>>>> url = 'http://www.google.com'
>>>> req = urllib2.Request(url)
>>>> response = urllib2.urlopen(req)
>>>>
> 
> req is clearly an instance of urllib2.Request and not a Request object.

Yes -- it seems both the 'Request Object' and 'Request Instance' terms 
are used.

If you feel it's a bug you can report this at http://bugs.python.org, 
but I'm not sure what else an object would be if not an instance of a 
class...

Emile
-----

 >>> help (urllib2)
Help on module urllib2:

NAME
     urllib2 - An extensible library for opening URLs
     using a variety of protocols

FILE
     c:\python24\lib\urllib2.py

DESCRIPTION
     The simplest way to use this module is to call the
     urlopen function, which accepts a string containing
     a URL or a Request object (described below).
---------------^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

<snip 2 paragraphs>

     urlopen(url, data=None) -- basic usage is that same
     as original urllib.  pass the url and optionally data
     to post to an HTTP URL, and get a file-like object
     back.  One difference is that you can also pass a
     Request instance instead of URL.
----^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^