title: Curl-like sending of client certificates without PyCurl: how?
body: <p>Our client wants a client script that will be installed on their customers' computers to be as trivial to install as possible. This means no extra-install packages, in this case PyCurl.</p>
  
  <p>We need to be able to connect to a website using SSL and expecting a client certificate. Currently this is done calling Curl with os.system() but to get the http return code doing this it looks like we'll have to use the '-v' option to Curl and comb through this output. Not difficult, just a bit icky.</p>
  
  <p>Is there some other way to do this using the standard library that comes with Python 2.6?
  I read everything I could find on this and I couldn't see a non-Curl way of doing it.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks in advance for any guidance on this subject whatsoever!</p>