Setting and Getting The Default Socket Timeout

Sometimes, you need tomanipulate the default values of certain properties of a socket library,for example, the socket timeout.

How to do it...

You can make an instance of a socket object and call agettimeout()method to get the default timeout value and thesettimeout()method to set a specific timeout value. This is very useful in developing custom server applications.

We first create a socket object inside atest_socket_timeout()function. Then, we can use the getter/setter instance methods to manipulate timeout values.

Listing 1.6 showssocket_timeoutas follows:

import socket

def test_socket_timeout():
    s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
    print "Default socket timeout: %s" %s.gettimeout()
    s.settimeout(100)
    print "Current socket timeout: %s" %s.gettimeout()    

if __name__ == '__main__':
    test_socket_timeout()

After running the preceding script, you can see how this modifies the default socket timeout as follows:

$ python 1_6_socket_timeout.py 
Default socket timeout: None
Current socket timeout: 100.0

How it works...

In this code snippet, we have first created a socket object by passing the socket family and socket type as the first and secondarguments of the socket constructor. Then, you can get the socket timeout value by callinggettimeout()and alter the value by calling thesettimeout()method. The timeout value passed to thesettimeout()method can be in seconds (non-negative float) orNone. This method is used for manipulating the blocking-socket operations. Setting a timeout ofNonedisables timeouts on socket operations.