Question

I am learning Python at the moment, and I come from a Java/C++ and C background. I usually like to “examine” the “objects” in debuggers to get a better understanding of what is going on, so excuse my question if it seems odd for python.

I was reading the urllib2 documentation at Python’s website. The following example was shown:

>>> import urllib2
>>> for line in urllib2.urlopen('http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/cgi-bin/timer.pl'):
...     if 'EST' in line or 'EDT' in line:  # look for Eastern Time
...         print line

I understand that urlopen will download the content of a page.

Does urlopen download the HTML content? I tried doing the following:

content = urllib2.urlopen('http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/cgi-bin/timer.pl')
print content

which yields an object. What is the nature of this object? Is it a dictionary-like object? If so, how can I examine what its key-values are? Would that be done using pickling in Python?

I am aware of the geturl() method, but I’d like to understand fully what urlopen() does and return.

Thank you!

Answer 1

Yes, and you can print the content using:

print content.read()

also, I’d like to suggest IPython, so you can inspect object methods and attributes very easily:

dir(content)