need a thread to keep a socket connection alive?

[Fredrik Lundh]

Roy Smith wrote:

> If you want to read fixed-length messages (as you appear to be trying to do
> with your recv(158)), you need to build a buffering layer which reads from
> the socket into a buffer and then doles out messages to a higher layer from
> that buffer.

> This is not a trivial problem.  By the time you're done with it, you will
> have learned a lot about how to communicate over a network.

however, creating a buffered layer for reading is a trivial problem: just call
makefile on the socket object, and use the resulting object as a file handle:

    >>> s = socket.socket()
    >>> s.connect(("www.python.org", 80))
    >>> s.send("GET / HTTP/1.0\n\n")
    16
    >>> f = s.makefile()
    >>> f.readline()
    'HTTP/1.1 200 OK\r\n'
    >>> f.readline()
    'Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2006 12:37:46 GMT\r\n'
    >>> f.read(10)
    'Server: Ap'
    >>> f.read(10)
    'ache/2.0.5'
    >>> f.readline()
    '4 (Debian GNU/Linux) DAV/2 SVN/1.1.4 mod_python/3.1.3 ...
    >>> f.readline()
    'Last-Modified: Mon, 24 Apr 2006 04:52:53 GMT\r\n'

etc.

</F>