How to know if urllib.urlretrieve succeeds?

Consider using urllib2 if it possible in your case. It is more advanced and easy to use than urllib.

You can detect any HTTP errors easily:

>>> import urllib2>>> resp = urllib2.urlopen("http://google.com/abc.jpg")Traceback (most recent call last):<<MANY LINES SKIPPED>>urllib2.HTTPError: HTTP Error 404: Not Found

resp is actually HTTPResponse object that you can do a lot of useful things with:

>>> resp = urllib2.urlopen("http://google.com/")>>> resp.code200>>> resp.headers["content-type"]'text/html; charset=windows-1251'>>> resp.read()"<<ACTUAL HTML>>"

I keep it simple:

# Simple downloading with progress indicator, by Cees Timmerman, 16mar12.import urllib2remote = r"http://some.big.file"local = r"c:\downloads\bigfile.dat"u = urllib2.urlopen(remote)h = u.info()totalSize = int(h["Content-Length"])print "Downloading %s bytes..." % totalSize,fp = open(local, 'wb')blockSize = 8192 #100000 # urllib.urlretrieve uses 8192count = 0while True:    chunk = u.read(blockSize)    if not chunk: break    fp.write(chunk)    count += 1    if totalSize > 0:        percent = int(count * blockSize * 100 / totalSize)        if percent > 100: percent = 100        print "%2d%%" % percent,        if percent < 100:            print "\b\b\b\b\b",  # Erase "NN% "        else:            print "Done."fp.flush()fp.close()if not totalSize:    print

According to the documentation is is undocumented

to get access to the message it looks like you do something like:

a, b=urllib.urlretrieve('http://google.com/abc.jpg', r'c:\abc.jpg')

b is the message instance

Since I have learned that Python it is always useful to use Python's ability to be introspective when I type

dir(b) 

I see lots of methods or functions to play with

And then I started doing things with b

for example

b.items()

Lists lots of interesting things, I suspect that playing around with these things will allow you to get the attribute you want to manipulate.

Sorry this is such a beginner's answer but I am trying to master how to use the introspection abilities to improve my learning and your questions just popped up.

Well I tried something interesting related to this-I was wondering if I could automatically get the output from each of the things that showed up in the directory that did not need parameters so I wrote:

needparam=[]for each in dir(b):    x='b.'+each+'()'    try:        eval(x)        print x    except:        needparam.append(x)