pycurl

PycURL can be used to fetch objects identified by a URL from a Python program, similar to the urllib Python module. PycURL is mature, very fast, and supports a lot of features. PycURL is targeted at the advanced developer - if you need dozens of concurrent fast and reliable connections or any of the sophisiticated features as listed above then PycURL is for you. The main drawback with PycURL is that it is a relative thin layer over libcurl without any of those nice Pythonic class hierarchies. This means it has a somewhat steep learning curve unless you are already familiar with libcurl's C API. To sum up, PycURL is very fast (esp. for multiple concurrent operations) and very feature complete, but has a somewhat complex interface. If you need something simpler or prefer a pure Python module you might want to check out urllib2 and urlgrabber.