Programming Python, 3rd Edition

14.1. "Socket to Me!" The preceding chapter introduced Internet fundamentals and explored socketsthe underlying communications mechanism over which bytes flow on the Net. In this chapter, we climb the encapsulation hierarchy one level and shift...

14.2. FTP: Transferring Files over the Net As we saw in the preceding chapter, sockets see plenty of action on the Net. For instance, the getfile example allowed us to transfer entire files between machines. In practic...

14.3. Processing Internet Email Some of the other most common, higher-level Internet protocols have to do with reading and sending email messages: POP and IMAP for fetching email from servers,[*] SMTP for sending new messages, and other formalisms...

14.4. POP: Fetching Email I admit it: up until just before 2000, I took a lowest-common-denominator approach to email. I preferred to check my messages by Telnetting to my ISP and using a simple command-line email interface. Of course, tha...

14.5. SMTP: Sending Email There is a proverb in hackerdom that states that every useful computer program eventually grows complex enough to send email. Whether such wisdom rings true or not in practice, the ability to automatically i...

14.6. email: Parsing and Composing Mails The second edition of this book used a handful of standard library modules (rfc822, StringIO, and more) to parse the contents of messages, and simple text processing to compose them. Additionally, t...

14.7. pymail: A Console-Based Email Client Let's put together what we've learned about fetching, sending, parsing, and composing email in a simple but functional command-line console email tool. The script in Example 14-20 impl...

14.8. The mailtools Utility Package The email package used by the pymail example of the prior section is a collection of powerful toolsin fact, perhaps too powerful to remember completely. At the minimum, some reusable boilerplate code f...

14.9. NNTP: Accessing Newsgroups So far in this chapter, we have focused on Python's FTP and email processing tools and have met a handful of client-side scripting modules along the way: ftplib, poplib, smtplib, email, mimetools, urllib...

14.10. HTTP: Accessing Web Sites Python's standard library (the modules that are installed with the interpreter) also includes client-side support for HTTPthe Hypertext Transfer Protocola message structure and port standard ...

14.11. Module urllib Revisited The httplib module we just met provides low-level control for HTTP clients. When dealing with items available on the Web, though, it's often easier to code downloads with Python's standard urllib module, i...

14.12. Other Client-Side Scripting Options In this chapter, we focused on client-side interfaces to standard protocols that run over sockets, but client-side programming can take other forms, too. For instance, in Chapter 18, we will meet client-s...