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

:) My first post on StackOverflow, have been a lurker for years. :)

Sadly dir(urllib.urlretrieve) is deficient in useful information. So from this thread thus far I tried writing this:

a,b = urllib.urlretrieve(imgURL, saveTo)
print "A:", a
print "B:", b

which produced this:

A: /home/myuser/targetfile.gif
B: Accept-Ranges: bytes
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Cache-Control: max-age=604800
Content-Type: image/gif
Date: Mon, 07 Mar 2016 23:37:34 GMT
Etag: "4e1a5d9cc0857184df682518b9b0da33"
Last-Modified: Sun, 06 Mar 2016 21:16:48 GMT
Server: ECS (hnd/057A)
Timing-Allow-Origin: *
X-Cache: HIT
Content-Length: 27027
Connection: close

I guess one can check:

if b.Content-Length > 0:

My next step is to test a scenario where the retrieve fails...