Question

I have this command

h = urllib.urlopen("http://google.com/")

How can I check if it retrieves me some error, internet down or something I don’t expect?

For example, something like

if error
print ‘ERROR’

Thank you

Answer 1

urllib.urlopen is deprecated as it was removed in Python 3.0. Use urllib2.urlopen instead and in the documentation it says:

Raises URLError on errors.

So do:

try:
    h = urllib2.urlopen("http://google.com/")
except urllib2.URLError as e:
    # do something with the exception e.g.
    print 'Error:', e.reason

or just a (meaningless) error message:

try:
    h = urllib2.urlopen("http://google.com/")
except urllib2.URLError:
    print 'An error occurred.'

---

URLError:

exception urllib2.URLError

The handlers raise this exception (or derived exceptions) when they run into a problem. It is a subclass of IOError.

reason
The reason for this error. It can be a message string or another exception instance (socket.error for remote URLs, OSError for local URLs).

---

You might want to read about Errors and Exceptions.