New User - Using tutorial and Docs - POST returns 302 Found

[JohnV]

I am using Python 2.5 r25:51908 MSC v.1318 32 bit (Intel) on wind32

I am totally new to Python and started yesterday going over a couple
of examples I found in the documentation which address a problem I am
trying to solve.

I have successfully opened a file and read the results adapting this
code snippit:

>>> f = open('/tmp/workfile', 'w')
>>> print f
<open file '/tmp/workfile', mode 'w' at 80a0960>
>>> f.read()
'This is the entire file.\n'
>>> f.close()


Then I tried to POST something to a cgi sytle script on my test
website.  Below is the code I used, I type it in one line at time to
make sure I am doing it correctly.  I am confused about how to format
several of the lines in the below script.

on the params line the name / value pair I want to send is name =
'textarea1' value = 0
on the conn line I put "thenational.us' as the domain
on the conn.request line I put the web path to the html page
(getpost.html) that processes the POST

The data is not being posted to the webpage. Concerning the
conn.request line, "/pages/" is what I call the cgi-bin directory,
"start" is the name of the cgi script I use (no ext), "/test/
getpost.html" is the web path to the page that accepts the POST.  I do
not use GET because the data will be several k or larger in size when
I get it all working correctly.

>>> import httplib, urllib
>>> params = urllib.urlencode({'textarea1': 0})
>>> headers = {"Content-type": "application/x-www-form-urlencoded",
...            "Accept": "text/plain"}
>>> conn = httplib.HTTPConnection("thenational.us:80")
>>> conn.request("POST", "/pages/start/test/getpost.html", params, headers)
>>> response = conn.getresponse()
>>> print response.status, response.reason
302 Found
>>> data = response.read()
>>> conn.close()



My project I want to learn how to do is; I have data coming from an
external device over a com port that I manually download and save to a
file on my home computer with the manufacturer's software.  I then
want to move that data to my webserver where others can view the data
from a webpage.  My goal is to open a file on my home computer and
load the contents of that file to my website where I will store the
data and display it.  I could just copy the file to the webserver that
would accomplish the same thing as posting it as a var and saving that
to a file on the server.  Howerver, I am trying to automate the
process as much as possible with Python as when an event is happening,
new data is coming in over a period of seveal hour from the external
device over the com port.

Is there a better solution than POST