Ping a site in Python?

Question

How do I ping a website or IP address with Python?

Answer 1

Here's a short snippet using subprocess. The check_call method either returns 0 for success, or raises an exception. This way, I don't have to parse the output of ping. I'm using shlex to split the command line arguments.

  import subprocess
  import shlex

  command_line = "ping -c 1 www.google.comsldjkflksj"
  args = shlex.split(command_line)
  try:
      subprocess.check_call(args,stdout=subprocess.PIPE,stderr=subprocess.PIPE)
      print "Website is there."
  except subprocess.CalledProcessError:
      print "Couldn't get a ping."