How to tell if a connection is dead in python

Question

I want my python application to be able to tell when the socket on the other side has been dropped. Is there a method for this?

Answer 1

If I'm not mistaken this is usually handled via a timeout.

Answer 2

From the link Jweede posted:

exception socket.timeout¶

This exception is raised when a timeout occurs on a socket which has

had timeouts enabled via a prior call to settimeout(). The accompanying value is a string whose value is currently always “timed out”.

Here are the demo server and client programs for the socket module from the python docs

# Echo server program
import socket

HOST = ''                 # Symbolic name meaning all available interfaces
PORT = 50007              # Arbitrary non-privileged port
s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
s.bind((HOST, PORT))
s.listen(1)
conn, addr = s.accept()
print 'Connected by', addr
while 1:
    data = conn.recv(1024)
    if not data: break
    conn.send(data)
conn.close()

And the client:

# Echo client program
import socket

HOST = 'daring.cwi.nl'    # The remote host
PORT = 50007              # The same port as used by the server
s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
s.connect((HOST, PORT))
s.send('Hello, world')
data = s.recv(1024)
s.close()
print 'Received', repr(data)

On the docs example page I pulled these from, there are more complex examples that employ this idea, but here is the simple answer:

Assuming you're writing the client program, just put all your code that uses the socket when it is at risk of being dropped, inside a try block...

try:
    s.connect((HOST, PORT))
    s.send("Hello, World!")
    ...
except socket.timeout:
    # whatever you need to do when the connection is dropped

Answer 3

It depends on what you mean by "dropped". For TCP sockets, if the other end closes the connection either through close() or the process terminating, you'll find out by reading an end of file, or getting a read error, usually the errno being set to whatever 'connection reset by peer' is by your operating system. For python, you'll read a zero length string, or a socket.error will be thrown when you try to read or write from the socket.