What are the differences between the urllib, urllib2, urllib3 and requests module?

Question

In Python, what are the differences between the urllib, urllib2, urllib3 and requests modules? Why are there three? They seem to do the same thing...

Answer 1

Just to add to the existing answers, I don't see anyone mentioning that python requests is not a native library. If you are ok with adding dependencies, then requests is fine. However, if you are trying to avoid adding dependencies, urllib is a native python library that is already available to you.