Connecting to the Internet – web requests

Now that we discussed the try/except keywords, let's make use of it to build a simple application that connects to the Internet. We will write a simple application that retrieves the current time from the Internet. We will be making use of the requests library for Python (http://requests.readthedocs.io/en/master/#).

The requests module enables connecting to the Web and retrieving information. In order to do so, we need to make use of the get() method from the requests module to make a request:

import requests
response = requests.get('http://nist.time.gov/actualtime.cgi')

In the preceding code snippet, we are passing a URL as an argument to the get() method. In this case, it is the URL that returns the current time in the Unix format (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time).

Let's make use of the try/except keywords to make a request to get the current time:

#!/usr/bin/python3

import requests

if __name__ == "__main__":
  # Source for link: http://stackoverflow...