[Pipet Devel] http protocol, was: J.W. Bizzaro; TODO 20000218

[David Lapointe]

On Thu, 24 Feb 2000, Gary Van Domselaar wrote:
> Brad Chapman wrote:
> 
> > I will admit that I don't know *anything* about how http works, or
> > even the first place to get started (maybe Gary can give me some
> > clues?) but for right now I'll have the communication go on via a
> > reciever and sender class on each side, and then I can start to
> > incoporate http later.

Python has some modules (URLLIB, HTTPLIB,FTPLIB)  for dealing with these.

Otherwise   it's the same for everything sockets.  Open a socket on a port, write and read from the
socket ( just like a file ).

Try this. Use your favorite simple web site

%telnet webssite 80
(stuff comes back)
HEAD /  HTTPD/1.0<cr><cr>

or 

GET / HTTPD/1.0<cr><cr>

If you want to write to a CGI,  it's just a little more difficult.  Basically
collect all of the name=value pairs into a big string, calculate the length of the string, construct the headers, send it
and get ready for the result.  For http make sure you have a blank line between the headers and the content.  

There are several header lines depending what you are doing.  See "WebMaster in  a Nutshell".

print "Content-length: %d\n\n%s",length(stringnamevalues),stringnamevalues,

-- 
 .david
 David Lapointe
I can't understand why people are frightened by new ideas. I'm
frightened of old ones -- John Cage