Downloading data from an HTTP server

You would like to write a simple HTTP client to fetch some data from any web server using the native HTTP protocol. This can be the very first steps towards creating your own HTTP browser.

How to do it...

Let us access https://www.python.org/ with our Pythonic minimal browser.

You may need to install urllib module for the relevant Python versions:

$ sudo pip2 install urllib

Listing 4.1 explains the following code for a simple HTTP client:

#!/usr/bin/env python 
# Python Network Programming Cookbook -- Chapter - 4 
# This program requires Python 3.5.2 or any later version 
# It may run on any other version with/without modifications. 
# 
# Follow the comments inline to make it run on Python 2.7.x. 
 
import argparse 
 
import urllib.request 
# Comment out the above line and uncomment the below for Python 2.7.x. 
#import urllib2 
 
REMOTE_SERVER_HOST = 'http://www.cnn.com' 
 
class HTTPClient: 
 
    def __init__(self, host): 
        self.host = host 
 
   ...