Last Updated: February 25, 2016

Read STDOUT from Telnet Terminal in Python

Here's a little Python recipe that I use whenever I have to deal with getting the stdout from a telnet terminal (more often than you'd think!).

The code (Python):

import telnetlib


class TelnetWorkers(object):
 """
 Creates our connection, holds and handles data.
 """

 def __init__(self, IP, PORT):
 # IP and PORT are strings
 self.connection = telnetlib.Telnet(IP, PORT)
 self.data = []

 def getMoreData(self):
 """
 Reads STDOUT, splits on and strips '\r\n'.

 Returns list.
 """
 # 10 means that we're going to timeout after 10 seconds if
 # we don't get any input that satisfies our regex.
 cursor = self.connection.read_until('\r\n', 10)

 # Make sure we have something to work with.
 if len(cursor) > 0:
 for line in cursor.split(','):
 # Sometimes we get empty strings on split.
 if line != '':
 self.data.append(line)
 return self.data

 ... Add your specific methods here ...

This is useful if you're receiving data, such as from shipping lanes (AIS data), to a telnet server and want to use that data in some way (decoding for message/position display).

#python

#telnet

#recipe