Building a Web Client in Python

From Al Lukaszewski, former About.com Guide

Now we get to communicate with the server. In retrieving information from a web server, web browsers send their requests in the following format:

<type of request> <file name> <protocol to use>

Our web client will ask the server to "GET" a given file using the HTTP 1.0 protocol. To communcate this, we write to the file-like object of the socket instance:

fileobj.write("GET "+filename+" HTTP/1.0\n\n")

The server will then respond with the data, and that data will be buffered as a file-like object. But our program will not get it unless we read it. So read the file object into another variable, here called buff.

buff = fileobj.readlines()

• 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