Getting an encoding error using sockets in Python

Question

I have created two scripts which establish a client socket and server socket in localhost.

Server socket

import socket
from time import ctime

HOST = ''
PORT = 21567
BUFSIZ = 1024
ADDR = (HOST,PORT)

tcpsersoc = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET,socket.SOCK_STREAM)
tcpsersoc.bind(ADDR)
tcpsersoc.listen(5)

while True:
    print('waiting for connection .... ')
    print(ADDR)
    tcpClisoc,addr = tcpsersoc.accept()
    print('......connected from', addr)

    while True:
        data = tcpClisoc.recv(BUFSIZ)
        if not data:
            break
        tcpClisoc.send('[%s]%s'%(bytes(ctime(),'UTF-8'),data))

    tcpClisoc.close()

tcpsersoc.close()

Client socket

from socket import *

HOST= '127.0.0.1'
PORT = 21567
BUFSIZ = 1024
ADDR = (HOST,PORT)

tcpCliSock = socket(AF_INET,SOCK_STREAM)
tcpCliSock.connect(ADDR)

while True:
    data = input('>')
    if not data:
        break
    tcpCliSock.send(data.encode('utf-8'))
    data = tcpCliSock.recv(BUFSIZ)
    if not data:
        break
    print(data.decode('utf-8'))

tcpCliSock.close()

I'm still getting the below error despite converting the data into a bytes object. I'm using python 3.x

this is the error raised by the server socket

waiting for connection .... 
('', 21567)
......connected from ('127.0.0.1', 52859)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#9>", line 1, in <module>
    import exampletcpserver
  File "C:/Python34\exampletcpserver.py", line 23, in <module>
    tcpClisoc.send('[%s]%s'%(bytes(ctime(),'UTF-8'),data))
TypeError: 'str' does not support the buffer interface

Please let me know where i'm going wrong.

Answer 1

You are trying to send a string, but sockets require you to send bytes. Use

tcpClisoc.send(('[%s]%s' % (ctime(), data.decode("UTF-8"))).encode("UTF-8"))

Python 3.5 will support the alternative

tcpClisoc.send(b'[%s]%s' % (bytes(ctime(), 'UTF-8'), data))