Book Image

Learning Python Networking - Second Edition

By : José Manuel Ortega, Dr. M. O. Faruque Sarker, Sam Washington
Book Image

Learning Python Networking - Second Edition

By: José Manuel Ortega, Dr. M. O. Faruque Sarker, Sam Washington

Overview of this book

Network programming has always been a demanding task. With full-featured and well-documented libraries all the way up the stack, Python makes network programming the enjoyable experience it should be. Starting with a walk through of today's major networking protocols, through this book, you'll learn how to employ Python for network programming, how to request and retrieve web resources, and how to extract data in major formats over the web. You will utilize Python for emailing using different protocols, and you'll interact with remote systems and IP and DNS networking. You will cover the connection of networking devices and configuration using Python 3.7, along with cloud-based network management tasks using Python. As the book progresses, socket programming will be covered, followed by how to design servers, and the pros and cons of multithreaded and event-driven architectures. You'll develop practical clientside applications, including web API clients, email clients, SSH, and FTP. These applications will also be implemented through existing web application frameworks.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Introduction to Network and HTTP Programming
4
Section 2: Interacting with APIs, Web Scraping, and Server Scripting
9
Section 3: IP Address Manipulation and Network Automation
13
Section 4: Sockets and Server Programming

Handling forms with urllib and requests with Python 3.7

In this section, we will learn how to use urllib and requests to interact with HTML forms.

Handling forms with urllib

When working with forms, it is useful to use the POST method to send data to the server. The POST method is used for submitting user input from HTML forms and for uploading files to a server.

When using POST, the data that we wish to send will go in the body of the request. We can put any bytes data in there and declare its type by adding a Content-Type header to our request with an appropriate MIME type.

Let's look at an example for sending some HTML form data to a server by using a POST request, just as browsers do when we submit a form on a website...