Question

I am writing a very basic web server as a homework assignment and I have it running on localhost port 14000. When I browser to localhost:14000, the server sends back an HTML page with a form on it (the form’s action is the same address – localhost:14000, not sure if that’s proper or not).

Basically I want to be able to gather the data from the GET request once the page reloads after the submit – how can I do this? How can i access the stuff in the GET in general?

NOTE: I already tried socket.recv(xxx), that doesn’t work if the page is being loaded first time – in that case we are not “receiving” anything from the client so it just keeps spinning.

Answer 1

The secret lies in conn.recv which will give you the headers sent by the browser/client of the request. If they look like the one I generated with safari you can easily parse them (even without a complex regex pattern).

    data = conn.recv(1024)
    #Parse headers
    """
    data will now be something like this:

    GET /?banana=True HTTP/1.1
    Host: localhost:50008
    User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_3) AppleWebKit/534.53.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1.3 Safari/534.53.10
    Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
    Accept-Language: en-us
    Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
    Connection: keep-alive

    """
    #A simple parsing of the get data would be:
    GET={i.split("=")[0]:i.split("=")[1] for i in data.split("\n")[0].split(" ")[1][2:].split("&")}