system.net.httpGet

Description

Retrieves the document at the given URL using the HTTP GET protocol. The document is returned as a string. For example, if you use the URL of a website, you'll get the same thing you'd get by going to that website in a browser and using the browser's "View Source" function.

Syntax

system.net.httpGet(url)

Parameters

String url - The URL to retrieve.

Returns

String - The content found at the given URL.

Scope

All

Examples

Example 1:

# This code would return the source for Google's homepage

source = system.net.httpGet("http://www.google.com")

print source

Example 2:

# This code would query Yahoo Weather for the temperature in Sacramento, CA

# and then find the current temperature using a regular expression

response = system.net.httpGet("http://xml.weather.yahoo.com/forecastrss?p=95818")

# import Python's regular expression library

import re

# NOTE - if you've never seen regular expressions before, don't worry, they look

# confusing even to people who use them frequently.

pattern = re.compile('.*?<yweather:condition (.*?)/>', re.DOTALL)

match = pattern.match(response)

if match:

   subText = match.group(1)

   condition = re.compile('.*?text="(.*?)"').match(subText).group(1)

   temp = re.compile('.*?temp="(.*?)"').match(subText).group(1)

   print "Condition: ", condition

   print "Temperature (F): ", temp

else:

   print 'Weather service format changed'