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

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