Python http PUT request

I have a CherryPy service which accepts 'PUT' requests with a named payload parameter (it's name is , surprisingly, 'payload'). From cURL, this is easy to specify with the -F option, but I couldn't find anywhere how to do this with Python. I discovered something a bit odd, which seems to be that the payload needs to be specified twice:

import urllib, httplib

import time, calendar

import base64

if __name__=='__main__':

timenow=time.gmtime()

t=time.asctime(timenow)

iov1=str(calendar.timegm(timenow))+'000000000'

iov2=str(calendar.timegm(timenow) + 1) +'000000000'

p=''+t+''

px=urllib.quote_plus(p)

pe=urllib.urlencode({"payload":p})

urlbase='putserver.cern.ch:8081'

testPut='DEVDB10/ATLAS_SCT_COMMCOND_DEV/PUTS200/TEST/PUT/Multi/timespan/'+iov1+''+iov2+"?payload="+px

test='/cooldb'

testMerge='/cooldb/merge'

print px

print urlbase

authHeader={"Authorization": "Basic "+base64.encodestring('name:pwd'), "Content-Length":str(len(px))}

#payload=px

h=httplib.HTTPConnection(urlbase)

h.request('PUT',testPut,px,authHeader)

r=h.getresponse()

print r.status, r.reason

print r.read()

h.close()