Hi - I'm writing some Python code to interact with Amazon's S3 service. One feature of S3 is that it will allow you to use the HTTP HEAD request to retrieve metadata about an S3 object without actually retrieving the content of the object. In trying to use this feature, I'm running into what I think is a bug in httplib.py.
If the resource I perform the HEAD request on exists within S3 then everything is fine. If, however, the resource doesn't exist then a 404 is returned. If the request had been a GET rather than a HEAD the body of the response would be some XML that gave further information about the error status returned. However, for a HEAD request no body can be returned so the body is empty. The error response, for either HEAD or GET, does include the following header: transfer-encoding: chunked And this seems to be causing confusion in httplib.py. I have to call the read method of the response or else I get a ResponseNotReady exception on my next request. When I attempt to read the body of the error response to the HEAD request it is passed onto the _read_chunked method where it immediately tries to do a readline() on the connection which, of course, hangs because no body has been sent in the response. So, I know this is kind of a boundary condition and perhaps it hasn't come up before but it seems that the behavior of httplib is incorrect. I think something needs to be added to the _read_chunked method which checks if the request is a GET and, if so, just reads zero bytes from the socket and returns. Any comments? Thanks, Mitch -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
