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

A key point that I find missing in the above answers is that urllib returns an object of type whereas requests returns .

Due to this, read() method can be used with urllib but not with requests.

P.S. : requests is already rich with so many methods that it hardly needs one more as read() ;>