python: HTTP PUT with unencoded binary data

Question

I cannot for the life of me figure out how to perform an HTTP PUT request with verbatim binary data in Python 2.7 with the standard Python libraries.

I thought I could d

Answer 1

You're misreading the documentation: urllib2.Request expects the data already encoded, and for POST that usually means the application/x-www-form-urlencoded format. You are free to associate any other, binary data, like this:

import urllib2

data = b'binary-data'
r = urllib2.Request('http://example.net/put', data,
                    {'Content-Type': 'application/octet-stream'})
r.get_method = lambda: 'PUT'
urllib2.urlopen(r)

This will produce the request you want:

PUT /put HTTP/1.1
Accept-Encoding: identity
Content-Length: 11
Host: example.net
Content-Type: application/octet-stream
Connection: close
User-Agent: Python-urllib/2.7

binary-data