Sockets

What is the Web?

HTTP request methods

HTTP bin
With Python, we can easily create a socket and send requests. Below is a simple client script with a GET request. For more a more detailed discussion of sockets Real Python has a wonderful tutorial Socket Programming in Python by Nathan Jennings. Try pasting the script below into a Python shell.

import socket
mysock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
mysock.connect(('www.gutenberg.org', 80))
cmd = 'GET http://www.gutenberg.org/files/120/120-0.txt HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n'.encode()
mysock.send(cmd)

while True:
    data = mysock.recv(512)
    if len(data) < 1:
        break
    print(data.decode(),end='')

mysock.close()

You can also easily GET with the Python requests library

import requests
response = requests.get('http://data.pr4e.org/romeo.txt')

Experiment by looking at response.status_code,response.content, and response.text.

Still curious? Try using the requests library with the Twitter API

Note, you can also use the native Python urllib:

import urllib.request
response = urllib.request.urlopen('http://www.google.com')