How to store cookie jar to be used between functions inside class?

Question

I'd like to hear your suggestions on how to effectively store cookies, that are to be used inside a class by other functions. My current code looks like this:

class SomeClass:
    def __init__(self, username, password):
        self.logged_in      = False
        self.username       = username
        self.password       = password
        opener              = urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor())
        urllib2.install_opener(opener)

    def _login(self, username, password):
        if not self.logged_in:
            params = urllib.urlencode({'username': username, 'password': password})
            conn = urllib2.Request('http://somedomain.com/login', params)
            urllib2.urlopen(conn)
            self.logged_in = True

    def _checkLogin(self):
        if not self.logged_in:
            self._login(self.username, self.password)

    def doSomeStuffThatRequireCookies(self):
        self._checkLogin()
        data = urllib2.urlopen(conn).read()
        return data

Although above example works, I must build custom Request() if I do NOT want to make request with cookies and I am sure there must be better and more elegant way to do this.

Thank you.

Answer 1

First, as jathanism noticed, you are not actually installing the cookie jar.

import cookielib
...

opener = urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor(cookielib.CookieJar())) 

Then, urllib2.install_opener(opener) will install the opener globally(!), which you do not need to do. Remove urllib2.install_opener(opener).

For non-cookie requests do this:

You don't need to build the Request object, you can just call urlopen with url and params:

params = urllib.urlencode({'username': username, 'password': password})
urllib2.urlopen('http://somedomain.com/login', params)

For cookie requests, use the opener object:

self.opener.urlopen(url, data)