Added a simple example of how to use urllib and urllib2 to interact

with an api.

1 files changed, 33 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/docs/howto/usingurllib2.rst b/docs/howto/usingurllib2.rst
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+Using urllib2
+=============
+
+Python's standard library comes with some nice modules
+you can use to test your api or even write a full client.
+
+Here's an example which does a 'GET' on the `model-resource` examle
+in the sandbox.::
+
+    import urllib2
+    >>> r = urllib2.urlopen('htpp://rest.ep.io/model-resource-example')
+    # You can check if the response was ok:
+    >>> r.getcode()
+    200
+    # Or examin the resonse itself:
+    >>> print r.read()
+    [{"url": "http://rest.ep.io/model-resource-example/1/", "baz": "sdf", "foo": true, "bar": 123}]
+
+And here's an example which does a 'POST' to create a new instance::
+
+    # First encode tha data we want to POST, we'll use urllib for encoding
+    # and the time module to send the current time as as a string value for our POST
+    >>> import urllib, time
+    >>> d = urllib.urlencode((('bar', 123), ('baz', time.asctime())))
+    # Now use the Request class and specify the 'Content-type'
+    >>> req = urllib2.Request('http://rest.ep.io/model-resource-example/', data=d, headers={'Content-Type':'application/x-www-form-urlencoded'})
+    >>> resp = urllib2.urlopen(req)
+    >>> resp.getcode()
+    201
+    >>> resp.read()
+    '{"url": "http://rest.ep.io/model-resource-example/4/", "baz": "Fri Dec 30 18:22:52 2011", "foo": false, "bar": 123}'
+
+That should get you started to write a client for your own api.