Python send UDP packet

Your code works as is for me. I'm verifying this by using netcat on Linux.

Using netcat, I can do nc -ul 127.0.0.1 5005 which will listen for packets at:

  • IP: 127.0.0.1
  • Port: 5005
  • Protocol: UDP

That being said, here's the output that I see when I run your script, while having netcat running.

[9:34am][wlynch@watermelon ~] nc -ul 127.0.0.1 5005
Hello, World!

With Python3x, you need to convert your string to raw bytes. You would have to encode the string as bytes. Over the network you need to send bytes and not characters. You are right that this would work for Python 2x since in Python 2x, socket.sendto on a socket takes a "plain" string and not bytes. Try this:

print("UDP target IP:", UDP_IP)
print("UDP target port:", UDP_PORT)
print("message:", MESSAGE)

sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_DGRAM) # UDP
sock.sendto(bytes(MESSAGE, "utf-8"), (UDP_IP, UDP_PORT))

Manoj answer above is correct, but another option is to use MESSAGE.encode() or encode('utf-8') to convert to bytes. bytes and encode are mostly the same, encode is compatible with python 2. see here for more

full code:

import socket

UDP_IP = "127.0.0.1"
UDP_PORT = 5005
MESSAGE = "Hello, World!"

print("UDP target IP: %s" % UDP_IP)
print("UDP target port: %s" % UDP_PORT)
print("message: %s" % MESSAGE)

sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, # Internet
                     socket.SOCK_DGRAM) # UDP
sock.sendto(MESSAGE.encode(), (UDP_IP, UDP_PORT))

Tags:

Python

Sockets