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

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.