How to catch 404 error in urllib.urlretrieve

Question

Background: I am using urllib.urlretrieve, as opposed to any other function in the urllib* modules, because of the hook function support (see reporthook

Answer 1

You should use:

import urllib2

try:
    resp = urllib2.urlopen("http://www.google.com/this-gives-a-404/")
except urllib2.URLError, e:
    if not hasattr(e, "code"):
        raise
    resp = e

print "Gave", resp.code, resp.msg
print "=" * 80
print resp.read(80)

Edit: The rationale here is that unless you expect the exceptional state, it is an exception for it to happen, and you probably didn't even think about it -- so instead of letting your code continue to run while it was unsuccessful, the default behavior is--quite sensibly--to inhibit its execution.

Answer 2

The URL Opener object's "retreive" method supports the reporthook and throws an exception on 404.

http://docs.python.org/library/urllib.html#url-opener-objects

Answer 3

Check out urllib.urlretrieve's complete code:

def urlretrieve(url, filename=None, reporthook=None, data=None):
  global _urlopener
  if not _urlopener:
    _urlopener = FancyURLopener()
  return _urlopener.retrieve(url, filename, reporthook, data)

In other words, you can use urllib.FancyURLopener (it's part of the public urllib API). You can override http_error_default to detect 404s:

class MyURLopener(urllib.FancyURLopener):
  def http_error_default(self, url, fp, errcode, errmsg, headers):
    # handle errors the way you'd like to

fn, h = MyURLopener().retrieve(url, reporthook=my_report_hook)