How to know if urllib.urlretrieve succeeds?

Question

urllib.urlretrieve returns silently even if the file doesn\'t exist on the remote http server, it just saves a html page to the named file. For example:

Answer 1

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):
<>
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.code
200
>>> resp.headers["content-type"]
'text/html; charset=windows-1251'
>>> resp.read()
"<>"