Question

are there any simple examples you know of that demonstrate how a python program can pass data to a webserver? ive been looking for so long but i still cannot find any. something simple will do. say for example, a python program that generates some text or number that the webserver accepts and updates a field in a local site with. thank you very much

Answer 1

Generally speaking the easiest way to do this would be with urllib2.

Depending on what exactly you mean by “updates a field in a local site” you probably either want to send data in a GET or POST variable. Below are examples of doing each:

GET request:

import urllib2

response = urllib2.urlopen('http://example.com/some/path/?myvar=myvalue')

POST request:

import urlib2

response = urllib2.urlopen('http://example.com/some/path/', {'myvar': 'myvalue'})

The response object you get back is a file like object. Accordingly if you want to get the string contents of the response, you can simply call response.read() or if you want to look at the metadata of the response (e.g. headers, http status code, etc) you can call the response.info() method.

Finally a bit of advice for future, similar searches you probably will have more luck using the terminology “how to make an HTTP request with python” instead of “how to pass data to a webserver in python”. You will generally get much better results looking for details on how to accomplish a specific action action as opposed to a more general goal.