Question

I’m trying to make http request with python:

class DownloadManager():
    def __init__(self, servername):
        self.conn = httplib.HTTPConnection(servername)
        print self.conn

    def download(self, modname):
        params = urllib.urlencode({"name" : modname})
        self.conn.request("GET", "/getmod", params)
        resp = self.conn.getresponse()
        print resp.status
        print resp.reason
        if resp.status == 200:
            url = resp.read()
        else:
            return

        mod = urllib2.urlopen(url)
        return mod.read()

But getting:
400
Bad request

In server log I see:

WARNING  2011-08-15 06:58:39,692 dev_appserver.py:4013] Request body in GET is not permitted: name=Test
INFO     2011-08-15 06:58:39,692 dev_appserver.py:4248] "GET /getmod HTTP/1.1" 400 -

What’s wrong?

Answer 1

The GET request method can’t have anything in the body. If you want to pass arguments via the GET method, you have to add the url-encoded parameters to the URL after a question mark ‘?’ character:

params = urllib.urlencode({"name" : modname})
self.conn.request("GET", "/getmod?%s" % params)

However, what it appears you really want to do is a POST request:

params = urllib.urlencode({"name" : modname})
self.conn.request("POST", "/getmod", params)