[Tutor] sockets

[Kent Johnson]

Matt Richardson wrote:
> Just verifying what I looked up earlier:  are strings and binary 
> (through struct.pack) the only data types that can be sent through a 
> socket?  This is my first crack at socket programming, so I'll probably 
> have lots of questions to bug you with.

The socket library gives low-level access to socket connections. At this 
level, the only type of data is a byte stream which in Python is 
represented by a string.

There are higher-level protocols that support more structured data. You 
can use the pickle module to convert most data structures to strings 
which can be sent over a socket. XML-RPC is a remote procedure call 
standard that supports simple data structures; it is supported in 
xmlrpclib and SimpleXMLRPCServer. PyRO is another remote object protocol 
that is Python-specific.

What is it you want to do?

Kent