Handling urllib2's timeout? - Python

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 urllib2import socketclass MyException(Exception):    passtry:    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        raiseexcept socket.timeout, e:    # For Python 2.7    raise MyException("There was an error: %r" % e)

In Python 2.7.3:

import urllib2import socketclass MyException(Exception):    passtry:    urllib2.urlopen("http://example.com", timeout = 1)except urllib2.URLError as e:    print type(e)    #not catchexcept socket.timeout as e:    print type(e)    #catched    raise MyException("There was an error: %r" % e)