Welcome to w3lib’s documentation!

Overview

This is a Python library of web-related functions, such as:

• remove comments, or tags from HTML snippets
• extract base url from HTML snippets
• translate entites on HTML strings
• convert raw HTTP headers to dicts and vice-versa
• construct HTTP auth header
• converting HTML pages to unicode
• sanitize urls (like browsers do)
• extract arguments from urls

The w3lib library is licensed under the BSD license.

Modules

• w3lib Package
  • encoding Module
  • html Module
  • http Module
  • url Module

Requirements

Python 2.7 or Python 3.3+

Install

pip install w3lib

Tests

nose is the preferred way to run tests. Just run: nosetests from the root directory to execute tests using the default Python interpreter.

tox could be used to run tests for all supported Python versions. Install it (using ‘pip install tox’) and then run tox from the root directory - tests will be executed for all available Python interpreters.

Changelog

History

The code of w3lib was originally part of the Scrapy framework but was later stripped out of Scrapy, with the aim of make it more reusable and to provide a useful library of web functions without depending on Scrapy.

Indices and tables

• Index
• Module Index
• Search Page