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

Well, the way timeout is handled in either 2.4 or 2.6 is the same. If you open the urllib2.py file in 2.6 u would see that it takes an extra argument as timeout and handles it using the socket.defaulttimeout() method as mentioned is answer 1.

So you really need not update your urllib2.py in that case.