Handling urllib2's timeout? - Python

Question

I'm using the timeout parameter within the urllib2's urlopen.

urllib2.urlopen('http://www.example.org', timeout=1)

How do I tell Python that if the timeout expires a custom error should be raised?

Any ideas?

Note: timeout parameter doesn't limit neither the total connection time nor total read (response) time. — jfs
– jfs, Commented Dec 5, 2015 at 17:37

dbr · Accepted Answer · 2013-05-14 13:33:20Z

105

There are very few cases where you want to use except:. Doing this captures any exception, which can be hard to debug, and it captures exceptions including SystemExit and KeyboardInterupt, which can make your program annoying to use..

At the very simplest, you would catch urllib2.URLError:

try:
    urllib2.urlopen("http://example.com", timeout = 1)
except urllib2.URLError, e:
    raise MyException("There was an error: %r" % e)

The following should capture the specific error raised when the connection times out:

import urllib2
import socket

class MyException(Exception):
    pass

try:
    urllib2.urlopen("http://example.com", timeout = 1)
except urllib2.URLError, e:
    # For Python 2.6
    if isinstance(e.reason, socket.timeout):
        raise MyException("There was an error: %r" % e)
    else:
        # reraise the original error
        raise
except socket.timeout, e:
    # For Python 2.7
    raise MyException("There was an error: %r" % e)

edited May 14, 2013 at 13:33

answered Apr 26, 2010 at 10:30

dbr

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7 Comments

Tal Weiss Over a year ago

This will not work in Python 2.7, as URLError does not catch socket.timeout anymore

dbr Over a year ago

@TalWeiss thanks, added an additional catch for socket.timeout

Nicolas L Over a year ago

As for Python 2.7.5 timeouts are caught by urllib2.URLError.

Artem Tsikiridis Over a year ago

@dbr Thanks, moreover it should be hasattr(e,'reason') and isinstance(e.reason, socket.timeout) as HttpError at least doesn't have a reason attribute in Python 2.6.

Kay Over a year ago

For what it's worth, with python 2.6.6 a timeout trying to connect seems to result in the urllib2.URLError. A timeout while reading the response from a slow server seems to result in socket.timeout. So overall, catching both allows you to distinguish these cases.

|

eshizhan · Accepted Answer · 2013-01-31 18:13:04Z

20

In Python 2.7.3:

import urllib2
import socket

class MyException(Exception):
    pass

try:
    urllib2.urlopen("http://example.com", timeout = 1)
except urllib2.URLError as e:
    print type(e)    #not catch
except socket.timeout as e:
    print type(e)    #catched
    raise MyException("There was an error: %r" % e)

answered Jan 31, 2013 at 18:13

eshizhan

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