What does Python’s socket.recv() return for non-blocking sockets if no data is received until a timeout occurs?

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In the case of a non blocking socket that has no data available, recv will throw the socket.error exception and the value of the exception will have the errno of either EAGAIN or EWOULDBLOCK. Example:

import sys
import socket
import fcntl, os
import errno
from time import sleep

s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
s.connect(('127.0.0.1',9999))
fcntl.fcntl(s, fcntl.F_SETFL, os.O_NONBLOCK)

while True:
    try:
        msg = s.recv(4096)
    except socket.error, e:
        err = e.args[0]
        if err == errno.EAGAIN or err == errno.EWOULDBLOCK:
            sleep(1)
            print 'No data available'
            continue
        else:
            # a "real" error occurred
            print e
            sys.exit(1)
    else:
        # got a message, do something :)

The situation is a little different in the case where you’ve enabled non-blocking behavior via a time out with socket.settimeout(n) or socket.setblocking(False). In this case a socket.error is stil raised, but in the case of a time out, the accompanying value of the exception is always a string set to ‘timed out’. So, to handle this case you can do:

import sys
import socket
from time import sleep

s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
s.connect(('127.0.0.1',9999))
s.settimeout(2)

while True:
    try:
        msg = s.recv(4096)
    except socket.timeout, e:
        err = e.args[0]
        # this next if/else is a bit redundant, but illustrates how the
        # timeout exception is setup
        if err == 'timed out':
            sleep(1)
            print 'recv timed out, retry later'
            continue
        else:
            print e
            sys.exit(1)
    except socket.error, e:
        # Something else happened, handle error, exit, etc.
        print e
        sys.exit(1)
    else:
        if len(msg) == 0:
            print 'orderly shutdown on server end'
            sys.exit(0)
        else:
            # got a message do something :)

As indicated in the comments, this is also a more portable solution since it doesn’t depend on OS specific functionality to put the socket into non-blockng mode.

See recv(2) and python socket for more details.

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