[Tutor] requests/responses from urllib2

[Alan Gauld]

"Eric Abrahamsen" <eric at ericabrahamsen.net> wrote

> that traffic go in and out of my server machine? The python docs say 
> that urllib2 requires the socket library to work, so I assume it's a 
> socket of some sort, but I don't really understand how that socket 
> is  addressed, from the point of view of the third-party server that 
> is  receiving my urllib2 request, and returning the response.

Virtually all network comms is over sockets. Your web browser
uses sockets every time it connects to a web server. Your web
server is using sockets to receive those requests.

The urllib implementation has to use the Python socket
module so there is a dependency but thats just what you'd expect.
It has to talk to a socket somehow and if it didn't use the socket
library directly it would either use a higher level library that in
turn used socket, or else it would have to implement sockets
itself at the C level.

> it appear to be coming from? If my web server (lighttpd in this 
> case)  is set to listen on a particular port, is there any way that 
> it can  'see' that traffic and interact with it, or is it purely 
> between the  python library and the outside world?

Your web server likely listens on port 80.
The urllib will send to port 80 by default.

-- 
Alan Gauld
Author of the Learn to Program web site
http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld