feedparser with timeout

Question

My code got stuck on this function call:

feedparser.parse("http://...")

This worked before. The url is even not possible to open in the browser. How would you cure this case? Is there a timeout possibility? I'd like to continue as if nothing would happen (only with printing some message or log this issue)

Answer 1

Use Python requests library for network IO, feedparser for parsing only:

# Do request using requests library and timeout
try:
    resp = requests.get(rss_feed, timeout=20.0)
except requests.ReadTimeout:
    logger.warn("Timeout when reading RSS %s", rss_feed)
    return

# Put it to memory stream object universal feedparser
content = BytesIO(resp.content)

# Parse content
feed = feedparser.parse(content)

Answer 2

You can specify timeout globally using socket.setdefaulttimeout().

The timeout may limit how long an individual socket operation may last -- feedparser.parse() may perform many socket operations and therefore the total time spent on dns, establishing the tcp connection, sending/receiving data may be much longer. See Read timeout using either urllib2 or any other http library.