Question

this is my first question posed to Stack Overflow, because typically I can find the solutions to my problem here, but for this particular situation, I cannot. I am writing a Python plugin for my compiler that outputs REST calls in various languages for interaction with an API. I am authenticating with the socket and ssl modules by sending a username and password in the request body in JSON form. Upon successful authentication, the API returns a response in the following format with important response data in the body:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
Date: Tue, 05 Feb 2013 03:36:18 GMT
Vary: Accept-Charset, Accept-Encoding, Accept-Language, Accept
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Access-Control-Allow-Methods: POST,OPTIONS,GET
Access-Control-Allow-Headers: Content-Type
Server: Restlet-Framework/2.0m5
Content-Type: text/plain;charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Length: 94

{"authentication-token":"<token>","authentication-secret":"<secret>"} 

This is probably a very elementary question for Pythonistas, given its powerful tools for String manipulation. But alas, I am a new programmer who started with Java. I would like to know what would be the best way to parse this entire response to obtain the "<token>" and "<secret>"? Should I use a search for a “{” and dump the substring into a json object? My intuition is telling me to try and use the re module, but I cannot seem to figure out how it would be used in this situation, since the pattern of the token and secret are obviously not predictable. Because I have opted to authenticate with a low-level module set, this response is one big String obtained by constructing the header and appending JSON data to it in the body, then executing the request and obtaining the response with the following code:

#Socket configuration and connection execution
sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
conn = ssl.wrap_socket(sock, ca_certs = pem_file)
conn.connect((host, port))
conn.send(req)

response = conn.recv()
print(response)

The print statement outputs the first code sample. Any help or insight would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

HTTP headers are split from the rest of the body by a \r\n\r\n sequence. Do something like:

import json

...

(headers, js) = response.split("\r\n\r\n")
data = json.loads(js)
token = data["authentication-token"]
secret = data["authentication-secret"]

You’ll probably want to check the response, etc, and various libraries (e.g. requests) can do all of this a whole lot easier for you.