<p>I want to open a TCP client socket in Python. Do I have to go through all the low-level BSD create-socket-handle / connect-socket stuff or is there a simpler one-line way?</p>

Opening sockets in python is pretty simple. You really just need something like this:
```
```
import socket
sock = socket.socket()
sock.connect((address, port))
```
```
and then you can
```
send()
```
and
```
recv()
```
like any other socket