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

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)