Read timeout using either urllib2 or any other http library

Question

I have code for reading an url like this:

from urllib2 import Request, urlopen
req = Request(url)
for key, val in headers.items():
    req.add_header(key, va         


        

Answer 1

I found in my tests (using the technique described here) that a timeout set in the urlopen() call also effects the read() call:

import urllib2 as u
c = u.urlopen('http://localhost/', timeout=5.0)
s = c.read(1<<20)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 1, in 
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/socket.py", line 380, in read
    data = self._sock.recv(left)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/httplib.py", line 561, in read
    s = self.fp.read(amt)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/httplib.py", line 1298, in read
    return s + self._file.read(amt - len(s))
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/socket.py", line 380, in read
    data = self._sock.recv(left)
socket.timeout: timed out

Maybe it's a feature of newer versions? I'm using Python 2.7 on a 12.04 Ubuntu straight out of the box.