Timeout a file download with Python urllib?

Question

Python beginner here. I want to be able to timeout my download of a video file if the process takes longer than 500 seconds.

import urllib
try:
   urllib.ur         


        

Answer 1

urlretrieve does not have that option. But you can easily perform your example with the help of urlopen and writing the result in a file, like so:

request = urllib.urlopen("http://www.videoURL.mp4", timeout=500)
with open("filename.mp4", 'wb') as f:
    try:
        f.write(request.read())
    except:
        print("error")

That's if you are using Python 3. If you are using Python 2, you should rather use urllib2.