I was working on retrieving mailbox storage statistics from Microsoft Exchange and needed to make a WebDAV request with the HTTP SEARCH method. Python's extensive web-related programming libraries surprisingly don't directly offer setting the request method. However, it was trivial to cook up the following "enhanced" Request class:

import urllib2

class Request(urllib2.Request):
    def __init__(self, url, method='GET', data=None, headers={},
                 origin_req_host=None, unverifiable=False):
        urllib2.Request.__init__(self, url, data, headers,
                                 origin_req_host, unverifiable)
        self.method = method

    def get_method(self):
        return self.method.upper()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    req = Request('http://projects.dowski.com/', 'HEAD')
    resp = urllib2.urlopen(req)
    print resp.headers