Building a Web Client in Python

As I mentioned earlier, every network client needs to know the address of the machine, the port of the service, and the name of the file on which it is to operate. Theoretically, we could take the port number from the command line. However, because the port usually determines the service, it is safer to hardwire the port (and therefore the service) into the program. For a web service, we will look on port 80.

import port = 80

Next, let's take the server's address and the name of the file from the command line. Because we are working on the Web, we can make us of the DNS and allow for URLs.

host = sys.argv[1]
filename = sys.argv[2]

• Network Programming is not Voodoo
• Programming Networks in Python: the Basics
• Importing Modules for Network Programming in Python
• Giving Python the Internet Protocol Information
• Creating a Socket With Python
• Connecting Sockets With Python
• Python Asks the Web Server for the File
• Printing the Web Page With Python
• The Python Code for a Simple Web Client Program