How can I organise program, which should have non-blocking connection on Python?

Question

My question is next: I want to write a program which should connect to the same program on the other machine, and both this program should exchange some information. I can't set up non-blocking connection. How can it be?

Answer 1

Take a look at the asyncore library: http://docs.python.org/library/asyncore.html

And specifically, the asynchat examples: http://docs.python.org/library/asynchat.html#asynchat.async_chat

It should do exactly what you need here.

Answer 2

The most simple solution to have a non-blocking socket in Python is just to use the setblocking() method on the socket. Something like this:

import socket

s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
s.setblocking(0)

# bind, accept or connect stuff

s.recv(100) # will not block and if no data available a "socket.error"
            # exception will be raised

You may also want to take a look at settimeout()

Answer 3

If you want to pass Python objects, you can "serialize" them with the pickle module and send them through sockets, as described in other answers.