In this tutorial I am going to give you a gentle introduction to network programming in Python. If you are new to programming or new to Python then that may seem like a daunting thought. But read on and you will be pleasantly surprised how easy it is.

Like most modern programming languages, Python was designed for networking from the very beginning, and thanks to that, a lot of the networking tasks you would want to accomplish with the language are made a whole lot easier.

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Network communication is a large topic, but if it is something that interests you then read on because in this tutorial I will show you how to download a web page. I will show you how easy Python makes tasks like this.

Take a look at the following code:

import urllib
	
con = urllib.urlopen("http://hartmannsoftware.com")
page = con.read()
con.close()
print page

Yes, you’re eyes are just fine. That really is only five lines of code to perform such a powerful operation. So what does it all mean?

The first line of code imports the urllib module for us to use. This module contains various networking functions we can use to perform network based operations such as connecting to a server and receiving data.

On the second line we call the urlopen function of the urllib module and give it the address of the page we want to download. In this case I’ve used Slashdot but you can easily replace that with any other address. We assign the result of the urlopen function to our variable named con, which is a connection object.

Next up on the third line of code we create a variable called page and assign it the results of our connection objects read function. In this case the result will be all the html and text and found on the web page.

The fourth line is simple enough to understand. All it does is close the connection so we can’t send and receive any more data.

And lastly we use the print statement to output all the data we received, which will basically be every piece of text, html, javascript and css which makes up the web page.

So there, you have it. In just five lines of code you were able to connect to a server and then download a web page from it. Trying to do the same thing in other languages can be a rather long winded experience often requiring you to have a good knowledge of how sockets work.

Now, I will be the first to admit that downloading a web page isn’t exactly the most exciting thing you can do in Python, but it gives you a taste of the kind of power which is built into the language and the sheer simplicity of it is amazing.

So I hope you enjoyed this article and if you are interested in learning more then pay us a visit again for more tutorials to help you learn.