Background: I am using urllib.urlretrieve, as opposed to any other function in the urllib* modules, because of the hook function support (see reporthook below) .. which is used to display a textual progress bar. This is Python >=2.6.
>>> urllib.urlretrieve(url[, filename[, reporthook[, data]]])
However, urlretrieve is so dumb that it leaves no way to detect the status of the HTTP request (eg: was it 404 or 200?).
>>> fn, h = urllib.urlretrieve('http://google.com/foo/bar')
>>> h.items()
[('date', 'Thu, 20 Aug 2009 20:07:40 GMT'),
('expires', '-1'),
('content-type', 'text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1'),
('server', 'gws'),
('cache-control', 'private, max-age=0')]
>>> h.status
''
>>>
What is the best known way to download a remote HTTP file with hook-like support (to show progress bar) and a decent HTTP error handling?
解决方案
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)