What is the quickest way to HTTP GET in Python?

What is the quickest way to HTTP GET in Python if I know the content will be a string? I am searching the documentation for a quick one-liner like:

contents = url.get("http://example.com/foo/bar")

But all I can find using Google are httplib and urllib – and I am unable to find a shortcut in those libraries.

Does standard Python 2.5 have a shortcut in some form as above, or should I write a function url_get?

1. I would prefer not to capture the output of shelling out to wget or curl.

Python 3:

import urllib.request
contents = urllib.request.urlopen("http://example.com/foo/bar").read()

Python 2:

import urllib2
contents = urllib2.urlopen("http://example.com/foo/bar").read()

Documentation for urllib.request and read.