Sockets in Python - Sockets...Simplified
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While the socket library is good for many things, there are several libraries built on the socket library that make development easier and faster. Say you wanted to connect to the official Python site to retrieve a piece of information. You could accomplish this task with the socket library, but there's no use working at such a low level when other libraries could do this in a shorter amount of lines. There are libraries for HTTP, FTP, Gopher, telnet and more.

A Real-World Problem and a Pythonic Solution

Let's say that you need to convert United States Dollars into Euros. This may seem complex at first, but it really isn't. It can be accomplished with sockets. We'll use the urllib library to connect to 'http://xe.com' and convert ten dollars into Euros.

Open up the Python command line and import the urllib module:

>>> import urllib

Connecting to the currency converter website I mentioned is simple with the urllib library -- a lot simpler than it would have been if I had used the socket library alone. It can be accomplished with the following line of code:

>>> currency = urllib.urlopen ( 'http://xe.com/ucc/convert.cgi?Amount=10&From=USD&To=EUR' )
>>> data = currency.read()

If you attempt to print out the data variable, you will get a good bit of junk that is not necessary in our script. However, here are the key lines:

<TD ALIGN=RIGHT><FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">
<FONT SIZE=+1><B>10.00 USD</B></FONT><FONT SIZE=-1><BR>United States Dollars
</FONT></TD>
<TD> </TD>
<TD ALIGN=CENTER><FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica" SIZE=+3><B>=</B></FONT></TD>
<TD> </TD>
<TD ALIGN=LEFT><FONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica">
<FONT SIZE=+1><B>7.46213 EUR</B></FONT><FONT SIZE=-1><BR>Euro
</FONT></TD>

( Note that the values above are outdated. )

We can use regular expressions to sort through all the junk and take out the figures we need from the above code:

>>> import re
>>> euros = re.search ( '(\d*)\.(\d*) EUR', data )
>>> print '10 United States Dollars are equal to...' >>> print euros.group ( 1 ) + '.' + euros.group ( 2 ), 'Euros.'

We also need to clean up and close the connection like we did earlier:

>>> currency.close()

That's it, we've solved our problem in only a few lines! If we were to do it with the socket library, however, it would have required a number of more lines to accomplish the same result.

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Comments On: Sockets in Python

· I´m new to python and very thankful for this fine and concise article on Sockets in...    · Thanks. I must agree with you on the time-saving part, by the way. With Python,...    · Hi there.. listen() is about the specifying the size of the queue of connections to...    · Sorry, that's a bad habit of mine for setting the maximum amount of...    · what about in a script...you did the same thing everyone does...you show how to do...    · In that case, you would simply put the same code into a script.    · I'm getting the following when using your tutorial:>> mySocket.sendto('Wherefore...    · I think there's an error in the client code for datagrams in this article. The...    · nice article :)) and ty very much   >>> Post your comment now!