nntplib.NNTP.over()

NNTP.over(message_spec, *, file=None)

Send an OVER command, or an XOVER command on legacy servers. message_spec can be either a string representing a message id, or a (first, last) tuple of numbers indicating a range of articles in the current group, or a (first, None) tuple indicating a range of articles starting from first to the last article in the current group, or None to select the current article in the current group.

Return a pair (response, overviews). overviews is a list of (article_number, overview) tuples, one for each article selected by message_spec. Each overview is a dictionary with the same number of items, but this number depends on the server. These items are either message headers (the key is then the lower-cased header name) or metadata items (the key is then the metadata name prepended with ":"). The following items are guaranteed to be present by the NNTP specification:

• the subject, from, date, message-id and references headers
• the :bytes metadata: the number of bytes in the entire raw article (including headers and body)
• the :lines metadata: the number of lines in the article body

The value of each item is either a string, or None if not present.

It is advisable to use the decode_header() function on header values when they may contain non-ASCII characters:

>>> _, _, first, last, _ = s.group('gmane.comp.python.devel')
>>> resp, overviews = s.over((last, last))
>>> art_num, over = overviews[0]
>>> art_num
117216
>>> list(over.keys())
['xref', 'from', ':lines', ':bytes', 'references', 'date', 'message-id', 'subject']
>>> over['from']
'=?UTF-8?B?Ik1hcnRpbiB2LiBMw7Z3aXMi?= <martin@v.loewis.de>'
>>> nntplib.decode_header(over['from'])
'"Martin v. Löwis" <martin@v.loewis.de>'