I've just uploaded the first public release of poster to my website, and to the cheeseshop. I wrote poster to scratch an itch I've had with Python's standard library: it's hard to do HTTP file uploads. There are a few reasons for this, one is that the standard library doesn't provide a way to do multipart/form-data encoding, and the second reason is that there's no way to stream an upload to the remote server, you have to build the entire request in memory first before sending the request. poster addresses both these issues. The poster.encode module provides multipart/form-data encoding, and the poster.streaminghttp module provides streaming http request support. Here's an example of how you might use it:

# test_client.py

from poster.encode import multipart_encode

from poster.streaminghttp import register_openers

import urllib2



# Register the streaming http handlers with urllib2

register_openers()



# Start the multipart/form-data encoding of the file "DSC0001.jpg"

# "image1" is the name of the parameter, which is normally set

# via the "name" parameter of the HTML  tag.



# headers contains the necessary Content-Type and Content-Length

# datagen is a generator object that yields the encoded parameters

datagen, headers = multipart_encode({"image1": open("DSC0001.jpg")})



# Create the Request object

request = urllib2.Request("http://localhost:5000/upload_image", datagen, headers)

# Actually do the request, and get the response

print urllib2.urlopen(request).read()

Download it as a tarball or egg for python 2.5, or easy_install it from cheeseshop. Bugs, patches, comments or complaints are welcome!