This is a Python library of web-related functions, such as:

• remove comments, or tags from HTML snippets
• extract base url from HTML snippets
• translate entites on HTML strings
• encoding mulitpart/form-data
• convert raw HTTP headers to dicts and vice-versa
• construct HTTP auth header
• converting HTML pages to unicode
• RFC-compliant url joining
• sanitize urls (like browsers do)
• extract arguments from urls

The w3lib package consists of four modules:

• w3lib.url - functions for working with URLs
• w3lib.html - functions for working with HTML
• w3lib.http - functions for working with HTTP
• w3lib.encoding - functions for working with character encoding
• w3lib.form - functions for working with web forms

• Python 2.5, 2.6 or 2.7

pip install w3lib

See the NEWS file.

For more information, see the code and tests. The functions are all documented with docstrings.

nose is the preferred way to run tests. Just run: nosetests from the root directory.

The w3lib library is licensed under the BSD license.

The code of w3lib was originally part of the Scrapy framework but was later stripped out of Scrapy, with the aim of make it more reusable and to provide a useful library of web functions without depending on Scrapy.