timeout for urllib2.urlopen() in pre Python 2.6 versions

Question

The urllib2 documentation says that timeout parameter was added in Python 2.6. Unfortunately my code base has been running on Python 2.5 and 2.4 platforms.

Answer 1

you can set a global timeout for all socket operations (including HTTP requests) by using:

socket.setdefaulttimeout()

like this:

import urllib2
import socket
socket.setdefaulttimeout(30)
f = urllib2.urlopen('http://www.python.org/')

in this case, your urllib2 request would timeout after 30 secs and throw a socket exception. (this was added in Python 2.3)