I'm terribly sorry if this is unacceptable or answered elsewhere, but I've spent the last hour and a half looking for information on it, and have come up with nothing I can use. I'm brand spanking new to Python and have been given an assignment to pull an IP from a site. I'm able to get my program to read the site, but I'm simply unable to figure out what to do next. Every answer that remotely comes close to what I want is beyond my programming capabilities to the point that I just don't understand it, and tutorials don't actually get at the specific problem I'm having. Again, if there's any document or text I can read instead of wasting time, please send me that way.

import urllib.request
site = urllib.request.urlopen("http://homer.wcitac.org/~sec290/hwk2/")
print (site.read())
IP = site[10]
print (IP)

I know, it's simplistic, but I've only been doing this for a little while. As far as I can tell, it should print back the 10th (9th on the page) character so I have a starting point, so I can then use a colon to find the characters I want, but it's giving me "TypeError: 'HTTPResponse' object does not support indexing", and I've no idea what that means.

You have the site variable pointed to the return value of urllib.request.urlopen. In the next line, you call site.read(), which returns a string. In short, site is not referencing a string; it's referencing a response object which can be used to get the string content.

Since you already know site.read() returns a string, why not capture that as a variable and use it?

content = site.read()
print(content)