Python: [socket] A simple TCP client

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Submitted by chantra on Thu, 06/05/2008 - 19:34

python

This article will show how to connect to a remove TCP server using python's socket module.

In this tutorial, we are going to connect to a server, send some data and then read from the socket.

As an example, we are going to write a small script that will connect to coding.debuntu.org on port 80 and request the rss file: /rss.xml.
The server will then return the HTTP reply to the request, containing the HTTP headers and the HTTP message content.

Below is the script used:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import socket
import sys
HOST = 'coding.debuntu.org'
GET = '/rss.xml'
PORT = 80
try:
sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
except socket.error, msg:
sys.stderr.write("[ERROR] %s\n" % msg[1])
sys.exit(1)
try:
sock.connect((HOST, PORT))
except socket.error, msg:
sys.stderr.write("[ERROR] %s\n" % msg[1])
sys.exit(2)
sock.send("GET %s HTTP/1.0\r\nHost: %s\r\n\r\n" % (GET, HOST))
data = sock.recv(1024)
string = ""
while len(data):
string = string + data
data = sock.recv(1024)
sock.close()
print string
sys.exit(0)

Executing this script will produce:

./socket_client.py  
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 05 Jun 2008 19:22:34 GMT
Server: Apache
Set-Cookie: SESS25b075688450425d14146275d5eee6c2=30f08bf3bc69bfc905708aa7e4321c6b;
 expires=Sat, 28 Jun 2008 22:55:54 GMT; path=/; domain=.coding.debuntu.org
Expires: Sun, 19 Nov 1978 05:00:00 GMT
Last-Modified: Thu, 05 Jun 2008 19:22:34 GMT
Cache-Control: store, no-cache, must-revalidate
Cache-Control: post-check=0, pre-check=0
Connection: close
Content-Type: application/rss+xml; charset=utf-8

rss data.......

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