[Tutor] requests/responses from urllib2

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Thanks to you both. I'll read up on sockets, but it seems unlikely  
that it works the way I thought it might...

On Aug 12, 2008, at 8:45 PM, Kent Johnson wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 7:27 AM, Eric Abrahamsen
> <eric at ericabrahamsen.net> wrote:
>>
>> On Aug 11, 2008, at 6:54 PM, Kent Johnson wrote:
>>> I'm not sure if you want to see the traffic coming in from your  
>>> users,
>>> or the traffic from your server to the third-party server. I don't
>>> know what kind of interaction you want, either.
>>
>> I'd like to be able to see the response coming back from the third- 
>> party
>> server, and have lighttpd check its headers and either intercept it  
>> or allow
>> it back into the framework. Say if it's got a text content-type  
>> then let it
>> in to the framework, and if it's got an image content-type then  
>> ignore it or
>> throw it away. Rephrasing it this way makes it sound pretty  
>> unlikely. I
>> guess what I wanted was a better sense of how urllib2 uses a socket  
>> to make
>> the request, and how the response, on its way back to my server,  
>> finds that
>> socket. I thought that if the socket file was something that hung  
>> around
>> between requests, I might be able to configure lighttpd to 'listen  
>> in' on
>> that socket, and grab the response if it met certain criteria. But  
>> if that
>> were possible then urllib2 would raise an error, right?
>
> lighttpd will not see the traffic to the third-party server; the tp
> server is not making a request of lighttpd; your code is making a
> request of it. The response comes back on the same socket that was
> opened by the request; if you want to know how they match up you will
> have to learn about TCP/IP which is the underlying network protocol.
> This might help:
> http://www.amk.ca/python/howto/sockets/
>
> If you want to filter the response according to the headers, you can
> do that in your code. The response object returned by urllib2 includes
> an info() method that gives access to the response headers.
>
> Kent
>
> PS Please Reply All to reply to the list.