The modules described in this chapter provide various services to World-Wide Web (WWW) clients and/or services, and a few modules related to news and email. They are all implemented in Python. Some of these modules require the presence of the system-dependent module sockets, which is currently only fully supported on Unix and Windows NT. Here is an overview:
| cgi | Common Gateway Interface, used to interpret forms in server-side scripts. |
| urllib | Open an arbitrary object given by URL (requires sockets). |
| httplib | HTTP protocol client (requires sockets). |
| ftplib | FTP protocol client (requires sockets). |
| gopherlib | Gopher protocol client (requires sockets). |
| poplib | POP3 protocol client (requires sockets). |
| imaplib | IMAP4 protocol client (requires sockets). |
| nntplib | NNTP protocol client (requires sockets). |
| smtplib | SMTP protocol client (requires sockets). |
| urlparse | Parse a URL string into a tuple (addressing scheme identifier, network location, path, parameters, query string, fragment identifier). |
| sgmllib | Only as much of an SGML parser as needed to parse HTML. |
| htmllib | A parser for HTML documents. |
| xmllib | A parser for XML documents. |
| formatter | Generic output formatter and device interface. |
| rfc822 | Parse RFC 822 style mail headers. |
| mimetools | Tools for parsing MIME style message bodies. |
| multiFile | None |
| binhex | Encode and decode files in binhex4 format. |
| uu | Encode and decode files in uuencode format. |
| binascii | Tools for converting between binary and various ascii-encoded binary representation |
| xdrlib | The External Data Representation Standard as described in RFC 1014, written by Sun Microsystems, Inc. June 1987. |
| mailcap | Mailcap file handling. |
| mimetypes | Mapping of filename extensions to MIME types. |
| base64 | Encode/decode binary files using the MIME base64 encoding. |
| quopri | Encode/decode binary files using the MIME quoted-printable encoding. |
| SocketServer | A framework for network servers. |
| mailbox | Read various mailbox formats. |
| mimify | Mimification and unmimification of mail messages. |
| BaseHTTPServer | Basic HTTP server (base class for SimpleHTTPServer and CGIHTTPServer). |