The IETF landing page for RFCs is http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/, and reading through it tells us exactly what we want to know. We can access a text version of an RFC using a URL of the form http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc741.txt. The RFC number in this case is 741. Therefore, we can get the text format of RFCs using HTTP.

At this point, we can build a Python script for downloading an RCF document from IETF, and then display the information that's returned by the service. We'll make it a Python script that just accepts an RFC number, downloads the RFC in text format, and then prints it to stdout.

The main modules that we can find in Python to make HTTP requests are urllib and requests, which work at a high level. We can also use the socket module if we want to work at a low level.