[Web-SIG] how to post from a cgi script and not a html form??

[Graham Dumpleton]

On 05/11/2007, Alex Botero-Lowry <alex at puddlejumper.foxybanana.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 04, 2007 at 05:14:31PM -0800, Jeff Peery wrote:
> > hello,
> >   I'm pretty new to using python on the web, I've got a bit of code
> > that works pretty well to get form inputs and such. Now I need to post
> > some info to a gateway service (for credit card processing) and then
> > receive their response and do something with it. I can do this no
> > problem... except that I'm not sure how to post my dictionary (name
> > value pairs from form inputs i.e., credit card num, expire dates etc)
> > from the cgi script. I had been using the html forms to submit data to
> > the server, but now I need to do this from my cgi script. I think this is
> > pretty straight forward but I didn't see anything in the cgi module.
> > where do I start, or does anyone have some sample code? thanks!!
>
> You'll need httplib which luckily come with the stdlib so no need to install
> anything.
>
> Something like this should get you going:
>
> conn = httplib.HTTPConnection(remote_server)
> values = '&'.join([ '%s=%s' % a for a in values.items() ])

>From memory, better off using urllib.urlencode() for this as it will
properly quote and convert special characters.

> headers={'Content-Type':'application/x-www-form-urlencoded'}
> conn.request(method, url, values, headers=headers)
> res = conn.getresponse()
> data = res.read()
> return (res.status, res.reason, output)
>
> the important bits here are our crappy makeshift
> application/x-www-form-urlencoded rncoder which
> is the values line and our setting of the content-type. We also
> need to make sure the method passed to conn.request is 'POST' or
> 'PUT' (almost certainly POST) as these are the only ones that accept
> a body. I think the cgi module may have a better way of doing the
> encoding, but i've never found it.
>
> Alex
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