The xmlrpclib module was contributed to the standard
library by Fredrik Lundh, providing support for writing XML-RPC
clients. XML-RPC is a simple remote procedure call protocol built on
top of HTTP and XML. For example, the following snippet retrieves a
list of RSS channels from the O'Reilly Network, and then
lists the recent headlines for one channel:
import xmlrpclib
s = xmlrpclib.Server(
'http://www.oreillynet.com/meerkat/xml-rpc/server.php')
channels = s.meerkat.getChannels()
# channels is a list of dictionaries, like this:
# [{'id': 4, 'title': 'Freshmeat Daily News'}
# {'id': 190, 'title': '32Bits Online'},
# {'id': 4549, 'title': '3DGamers'}, ... ]
# Get the items for one channel
items = s.meerkat.getItems( {'channel': 4} )
# 'items' is another list of dictionaries, like this:
# [{'link': 'http://freshmeat.net/releases/52719/',
# 'description': 'A utility which converts HTML to XSL FO.',
# 'title': 'html2fo 0.3 (Default)'}, ... ]
The SimpleXMLRPCServer module makes it easy to create
straightforward XML-RPC servers. See http://www.xmlrpc.com/ for
more information about XML-RPC.
The new hmac module implements the HMAC
algorithm described by RFC 2104.
(Contributed by Gerhard Häring.)
Several functions that originally returned lengthy tuples now
return pseudo-sequences that still behave like tuples but also have
mnemonic attributes such as memberst_mtime or tm_year.
The enhanced functions include stat(),
fstat(), statvfs(), and fstatvfs()
in the os module, and localtime(),
gmtime(), and strptime() in the time
module.
For example, to obtain a file's size using the old tuples, you'd end
up writing something like file_size =
os.stat(filename)[stat.ST_SIZE], but now this can be written more
clearly as file_size = os.stat(filename).st_size.
The original patch for this feature was contributed by Nick Mathewson.
The Python profiler has been extensively reworked and various
errors in its output have been corrected. (Contributed by
Fred L. Drake, Jr. and Tim Peters.)
The socket module can be compiled to support IPv6;
specify the --enable-ipv6 option to Python's configure
script. (Contributed by Jun-ichiro ``itojun'' Hagino.)
Two new format characters were added to the struct
module for 64-bit integers on platforms that support the C
long long type. "q" is for a signed 64-bit integer,
and "Q" is for an unsigned one. The value is returned in
Python's long integer type. (Contributed by Tim Peters.)
In the interpreter's interactive mode, there's a new built-in
function help() that uses the pydoc module
introduced in Python 2.1 to provide interactive help.
help(object) displays any available help text about
object. help() with no argument puts you in an online
help utility, where you can enter the names of functions, classes,
or modules to read their help text.
(Contributed by Guido van Rossum, using Ka-Ping Yee's pydoc module.)
Various bugfixes and performance improvements have been made
to the SRE engine underlying the re module. For example,
the re.sub() and re.split() functions have
been rewritten in C. Another contributed patch speeds up certain
Unicode character ranges by a factor of two, and a new finditer()
method that returns an iterator over all the non-overlapping matches in
a given string.
(SRE is maintained by
Fredrik Lundh. The BIGCHARSET patch was contributed by Martin von
Löwis.)
The smtplib module now supports RFC 2487, ``Secure
SMTP over TLS'', so it's now possible to encrypt the SMTP traffic
between a Python program and the mail transport agent being handed a
message. smtplib also supports SMTP authentication.
(Contributed by Gerhard Häring.)
The imaplib module, maintained by Piers Lauder, has
support for several new extensions: the NAMESPACE extension defined
in RFC 2342, SORT, GETACL and SETACL. (Contributed by Anthony
Baxter and Michel Pelletier.)
The rfc822 module's parsing of email addresses is now
compliant with RFC 2822, an update to RFC 822. (The module's
name is not going to be changed to "rfc2822".) A new
package, email, has also been added for parsing and
generating e-mail messages. (Contributed by Barry Warsaw, and
arising out of his work on Mailman.)
The difflib module now contains a new Differ
class for producing human-readable lists of changes (a ``delta'')
between two sequences of lines of text. There are also two
generator functions, ndiff() and restore(),
which respectively return a delta from two sequences, or one of the
original sequences from a delta. (Grunt work contributed by David
Goodger, from ndiff.py code by Tim Peters who then did the
generatorization.)
New constants ascii_letters,
ascii_lowercase, and ascii_uppercase were
added to the string module. There were several modules in
the standard library that used string.letters to mean the
ranges A-Za-z, but that assumption is incorrect when locales are in
use, because string.letters varies depending on the set
of legal characters defined by the current locale. The buggy
modules have all been fixed to use ascii_letters instead.
(Reported by an unknown person; fixed by Fred L. Drake, Jr.)
The mimetypes module now makes it easier to use
alternative MIME-type databases by the addition of a
MimeTypes class, which takes a list of filenames to be
parsed. (Contributed by Fred L. Drake, Jr.)
A Timer class was added to the threading
module that allows scheduling an activity to happen at some future
time. (Contributed by Itamar Shtull-Trauring.)
