Question

Is there a standard function that will convert http headers into a python dictionary, and one to convert back?

They would need to support header folding, of course.

Answer 1

Rather than build your own using sockets etc I would use httplib Thus would get the data from the http server and parse the headers into a dictionary
e.g.

import httplib
conn = httplib.HTTPConnection("www.python.org")
conn.request("GET", "/index.html")
r1 = conn.getresponse()

dict = r1.getheaders()
print(dict)

gives

[(‘content-length’, ‘16788’), (‘accept-ranges’, ‘bytes’), (‘server’, ‘Apache/2.2.9 (Debian) DAV/2 SVN/1.5.1 mod_ssl/2.2.9 OpenSSL/0.9.8g mod_wsgi/2.5 Python/2.5.2’), (‘last-modified’, ‘Mon, 15 Feb 2010 07:30:46 GMT’), (‘etag’, ‘”105800d-4194-47f9e9871d580″‘), (‘date’, ‘Mon, 15 Feb 2010 21:34:18 GMT’), (‘content-type’, ‘text/html’)]

and methods for put to send a dictionary as part of a request.