integrating a web server into a python script

Question

I have written a program to generate sequences that pass certain filters (the exact sequences etc don't matter). Each sequence is generated by making a random string of 40 characters made up of C, G, T or A. When each string is generated, it is put through a set of filters, and if it passes the filters it is saved to a list.

I am trying to make one of those filters include an online tool, BPROM, which doesn't appear to have a python library implementation. This means I will need to get my python script to send the sequence string described above to the online tool, and save the output as a python variable.

My question is, if I have a url to the tool (http://www.softberry.com/berry.phtml?topic=bprom&group=programs&subgroup=gfindb), how can I interface my script that generates the sequences, with the online tool - is there a way to send data to the web tool and save the tool's output as a variable? I've been looking into requests but i'm not sure it is the right way to approach this (as a massive python/coding noob).

Thanks for reading, I'm a bit brain dead so I hope this made sense :P

Answer 1

Of course, you can use requests or urllib Here is demo code:

with urllib.request.urlopen('http://www.softberry.com/berry.phtml?topic=bprom&group=programs&subgroup=gfindb') as response:
   html = response.read()