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I am playing with HTTP transfers, just trying to make something work. I have a GAE server and I'm pretty sure it's working properly because it renders when I go to it with my browser, but here is the python code anyway:

import sys
print 'Content-Type: text/html'
print ''
print '<pre>'
number = -1
data = sys.stdin.read()
try:
    number = int(data[data.find('=')+1:])
except:
    number = -1
print 'If your number was', number, ', then you are awesome!!!'
print '</pre>'

I am just learning the whole HTTP POST vs GET vs Response process, but this is what I have been doing from the terminal:

$ telnet localhost 8080
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET http://localhost:8080/?number=28 HTTP/1.0

HTTP/1.0 200 Good to go
Server: Development/1.0
Date: Thu, 07 Jul 2011 21:29:28 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Cache-Control: no-cache
Expires: Fri, 01 Jan 1990 00:00:00 GMT
Content-Length: 61

<pre>
If your number was -1 , then you are awesome!!!
</pre>
Connection closed by foreign host.

I am using a GET here because I stumbled around for about 40 minutes trying to make a telnet POST work - with no success :(

I would appreciate any help on how to get this GET and/or the POST to work. Thanks in advance!!!!

startuprob
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    You're doing this in about the most painful way possible. Why not use WSGI and a framework on the server, and curl, wget or a web browser on the client? – Nick Johnson Jul 08 '11 at 00:41

1 Answers1

2

when using GET, no data will be present in the request body, so sys.stdin.read() is bound to fail. instead, you might want to look at the environment, specifically os.environ['QUERY_STRING']

Another thing you're doing a little strangely is you are not using the correct request format. The second part of the request should not include the url scheme, host or port, it should look like: 

GET /?number=28 HTTP/1.0

specify the host in a seperate Host: header; the server will determine the scheme on it's own.

When using POST, most servers won't read past the amount of data in the Content-Length header, which if you don't supply one, may be assumed to be zero bytes. The server may try to read any bytes after the point specified by the content-length to be the next request in a persistent connection, and when it doesn't begin with a valid request, it closes the connection. So basically:

POST / HTTP/1.0
Host: localhost: 8080
Content-Length: 2
Content-Type: text/plain

28

But why are you testing this in telnet? How about curl?

$ curl -vs -d'28' -H'Content-Type: text/plain' http://localhost:8004/
* About to connect() to localhost port 8004 (#0)
*   Trying ::1... Connection refused
*   Trying 127.0.0.1... connected
* Connected to localhost (127.0.0.1) port 8004 (#0)
> POST / HTTP/1.1
> User-Agent: curl/7.20.1 (x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.20.1 NSS/3.12.6.2 zlib/1.2.3 libidn/1.16 libssh2/1.2.4
> Host: localhost:8004
> Accept: */*
> Content-Type: text/plain
> Content-Length: 2
> 
* HTTP 1.0, assume close after body
< HTTP/1.0 200 OK
< Date: Thu, 07 Jul 2011 22:09:17 GMT
< Server: WSGIServer/0.1 Python/2.6.4
< Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
< Content-Length: 45
< 
* Closing connection #0
{'body': '28', 'method': 'POST', 'query': []}

or better yet, in python:

>>> import httplib
>>> headers = {"Content-type": "text/plain",
...            "Accept": "text/plain"}
>>> 
>>> conn = httplib.HTTPConnection("localhost:8004")
>>> conn.request("POST", "/", "28", headers)
>>> response = conn.getresponse()
>>> print response.read()
{'body': '28', 'method': 'POST', 'query': []}
>>>
SingleNegationElimination
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