Question

I am trying to make a timestamp server and client. The client code is:

from socket import *

HOST = '127.0.0.1' # or 'localhost'
PORT = 21567
BUFSIZ = 1024
ADDR = (HOST, PORT)

tcpCliSock = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM)
tcpCliSock.connect(ADDR)

while True:
    data = input('> ')
    if not data:
        break
    tcpCliSock.send(data)
    data = tcpCliSock.recv(BUFSIZ)
    if not data:
        break
    print(data.decode('utf-8'))

tcpCliSock.close()

and the server code is:

from socket import *
from time import ctime

HOST = ''
PORT = 21567
BUFSIZ = 1024
ADDR = (HOST, PORT)

tcpSerSock = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM)
tcpSerSock.bind(ADDR)
tcpSerSock.listen(5)

while True:
    print('waiting for connection...')
    tcpCliSock, addr = tcpSerSock.accept()
    print('connected from: ', addr)

    while True:
        data = tcpCliSock.recv(BUFSIZ)
        if not data:
            break
        tcpCliSock.send('[%s] %s' % (bytes(ctime(), 'utf-8'), data))

    tcpCliSock.close()
tcpSerSock.close()

The server is working fine but when I send any data to the server from the client I get the following error:

File "tsTclnt.py", line 20, in <module>
    tcpCliSock.send(data)
TypeError: 'str' does not support the buffer interface 

Answer 1

You need to encode the string in data to a buffer using the appropriate codepage. For example:

data = input('> ')
if not data:
    break
tcpCliSock.send(data.encode('utf-8'))

The server code needs to change too:

response = '[%s] %s' % (ctime(), data.decode('utf-8'))
tcpCliSock.send(response.encode('utf-8'))

See more at:

How do I convert a string to a buffer in Python 3.1?