select a section of text and run it into another process?

[Sayth Renshaw]

My emacs is going well, but something I would like to be able to do is run a 
section of code in a file and send it to an eshell process of python/ipython to 
evaluated.

How do I do this, I am not sure how to select the text without using the mouse, 
there are a lot of people guessing on this SO question 
(http://stackoverflow.com/questions/657672/how-to-select-or-highlight-a-block-in-emacs)
 but can anyone provide a solid answer? 

In the emacs manual it shows this article for sending to process 
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Input-to-Processes.html

which means I assume I could make a keybinding adaption if this

(process-send-string "shell<1>" "ls\n")

(process-send-string "eshell<ipython>" "some version of selected text")

Any ideas or is there a plugin that already does this? I would like to be able 
to do this with multiple file types but python is where I am starting.

Thanks

Sayth