Using httplib to connect to a website in Python

Question

tl;dr: Used the httplib to create a connection to a site. I failed, I'd love some guidance!

I've ran into some trouble. Read about socket and httplib of python's, altough I have some problems with the syntax, it seems.

Here is it:

connection = httplib.HTTPConnection('www.site.org', 80, timeout=10, 1.2.3.4)

The syntax is this:

httplib.HTTPConnection(host[, port[, strict[, timeout[, source_address]]]])

How does "source_address" behave? Can I make requests with any IP from it? Wouldn't I need an User-Agent for it?

Also, how do I check if the connect is successful?

if connection:
print "Connection Successful."

(As far as I know, HTTP doesn't need a "are you alive" ping every one second, as long as both client & server are okay, when a request is made, it'll be processed. So I can't constantly ping.)

Answer 1

Creating the object does not actually connect to the website:
HTTPConnection.connect(): Connect to the server specified when the object was created.

source_address seems to be sent to the server with any request, but it doesn't seem to have any effect. I'm not sure why you'd need to use a User-Agent for it. Either way, it is an optional parameter.

You don't seem to be able to check if a connection was made, either, which is strange.

Assuming what you want to do is get the contents of the website root, you can use this:

from httplib import HTTPConnection
conn = HTTPConnection("www.site.org", 80, timeout=10)
conn.connect()

conn.request("GET", "http://www.site.org/")
resp = conn.getresponse()

data = resp.read()
print(data)

(slammed together from the HTTPConnection documentation)

Honestly though, you should not be using httplib, but instead urllib2 or another HTTP library that is less... low-level.