socket
This module provides access to the BSD socket interface.
It is available on systems that support this interface.
For an introduction to socket programming (in C), see the following
papers: An Introductory 4.3BSD Interprocess Communication
Tutorial, by Stuart Sechrest and An Advanced 4.3BSD Interprocess
Communication Tutorial, by Samuel J. Leffler et al, both in the
Programmer's Manual, Supplementary Documents 1 (sections PS1:7
and PS1:8). The manual pages for the various socket-related
system calls also a valuable source of information on the details of
socket semantics.
The Python interface is a straightforward transliteration of the
system call and library interface for sockets to Python's
object-oriented style: the socket() function returns a
socket object whose methods implement the various socket system
calls. Parameter types are somewhat higer-level than in the C
interface: as with read() and write() operations on Python
files, buffer allocation on receive operations is automatic, and
buffer length is implicit on send operations.
Socket addresses are represented as a single string for the
AF_UNIX address family and as a pair
(host, port) for the AF_INET address family,
where host is a string representing
either a hostname in Internet domain notation like
'daring.cwi.nl' or an IP address like '100.50.200.5',
and port is an integral port number. Other address families are
currently not supported. The address format required by a particular
socket object is automatically selected based on the address family
specified when the socket object was created.
All errors raise exceptions. The normal exceptions for invalid
argument types and out-of-memory conditions can be raised; errors
related to socket or address semantics raise the error socket.error.
Non-blocking and asynchronous mode are not supported; see module
select for a way to do non-blocking socket I/O.
The module socket exports the following constants and functions:
Subsections