Establishing a websocket connection to SocketIO 1.x from Python

test_ws.py

import json

import requests
from websocket import create_connection

BASE = 'localhost:3000/socket.io/?EIO=3'


# First establish a polling-transport HTTP connection to get a session ID
url = 'http://%s&transport=polling' % BASE
print url
resp = requests.get(url)
print resp.status_code, resp.headers, resp.content

# Ignore the bin-packed preliminaries in the SocketIO response and just parse
# the JSON; it tells us everything we really need to know
json_data = json.loads(resp.content[resp.content.find('{'):])
sid = json_data['sid']
assert sid == resp.cookies['io']

# Now we have a session ID, establish a websocket connection
ws_url = 'ws://%s&transport=websocket&sid=%s' % (BASE, sid)
print ws_url
conn = create_connection(ws_url)

# Ping/pong not required, but verifies the connection is working
conn.send('2probe')
assert conn.recv() == '3probe'

# This is an "upgrade" packet. Not sure why it's needed, since we've already
# upgraded the connection to WebSocket and established a WebSocket
# connection. I guess maybe it upgrades our Socket.IO session to use this
# websocket connection as its transport? In any case, the next step doesn't
# work unless we do this first.
conn.send('5')

# Send a socket.io event!
# 4 = MESSAGE
# 2 = EVENT
# "chat" is event name, "hello" is payload
packet = '42["chat","hello"]'
conn.send(packet)

#from IPython import embed; embed()

why didn't I find this epic gist 3 hours earlier. thanks so much!!