Even though there are many web services that support only a subset of the RESTful architecture—GET and POST requests—fully RESTful services include PUT and DELETE requests as well.

PUT requests are a method for inserting new resources into a service. This request type is very similar to a POST request in technical implementation, and the two requests are often confused with each other.

In PHP, we will once again use a cURL request with some options set:

<?php
$url = 'http://www.example.com/request.php';
$postvals = 'firstName=John&lastName=Smith';

$ch = curl_init($url);
$options = array(
   CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST => 'PUT',
   CURLOPT_URL => $url,
   CURLOPT_POST => 1,
   CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => $postvals,
   CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER => array('Content-Length: ' . strlen($postvals)),
   CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => 1
);
curl_setopt_array($ch, $options);
$response = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
?>

This request mimics that of the POST request, except that we set a different CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST value (PUT). In this example, we can also set an HTTP header with the content length of the POSTed fields if required.

In Python, this request is a little trickier because there are a few quirks to making requests with urllib2:

import urllib
import urllib2

url = 'http://www.example.com/request.py'
postvals = {'first_name': 'John', 'last_name': 'Smith'}
params = urllib.urlencode(postvals)

opener = urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.HTTPHandler)
request = urllib2.Request(url, data=params)
request.add_header('Content-Type', 'application/json')
request.get_method = lambda: 'PUT'
f = opener.open(request)
response = f.read()

The following code in the urllib2 standard library helps us determine which HTTP method to use in a request:

def get_method(self):
    if self.has_data():
        return 'POST'
    else:
        return 'GET'

As you can see, it doesn’t exactly support any types other than GET and POST, so we need to make a few adjustments. We first generate our URL that will be called, and then build and encode the parameters to send with the PUT request. We then create our HTTP handler opener and generate the request to our URL with the parameter object through the urllib2.Request(...) request. Then, we add a Content-Type header for the request. Now we need to override the method that urllib2 will use in the request by manually setting the get_method to PUT. Finally, we open the URL location from the request object and read back the response.