In Python 3.2, I can open and read an HTTPS web page with http.client, but urllib.request is failing to open the same page

Question

I want to open and read https://yande.re/ with urllib.request, but I'm getting an SSL error. I can open and read the page just fine using http.client with this code:

import http.client

conn = http.client.HTTPSConnection('www.yande.re')
conn.request('GET', 'https://yande.re/')
resp = conn.getresponse()
data = resp.read()

However, the following code using urllib.request fails:

import urllib.request

opener = urllib.request.build_opener()
resp = opener.open('https://yande.re/')
data = resp.read()

It gives me the following error: ssl.SSLError: [Errno 1] _ssl.c:392: error:1411809D:SSL routines:SSL_CHECK_SERVERHELLO_TLSEXT:tls invalid ecpointformat list. Why can I open the page with HTTPSConnection but not opener.open?

Edit: Here's my OpenSSL version and the traceback from trying to open https://yande.re/

>>> import ssl; ssl.OPENSSL_VERSION
'OpenSSL 1.0.0a 1 Jun 2010'
>>> import urllib.request
>>> urllib.request.urlopen('https://yande.re/')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#3>", line 1, in <module>
    urllib.request.urlopen('https://yande.re/')
  File "C:\Python32\lib\urllib\request.py", line 138, in urlopen
    return opener.open(url, data, timeout)
  File "C:\Python32\lib\urllib\request.py", line 369, in open
    response = self._open(req, data)
  File "C:\Python32\lib\urllib\request.py", line 387, in _open
    '_open', req)
  File "C:\Python32\lib\urllib\request.py", line 347, in _call_chain
    result = func(*args)
  File "C:\Python32\lib\urllib\request.py", line 1171, in https_open
    context=self._context, check_hostname=self._check_hostname)
  File "C:\Python32\lib\urllib\request.py", line 1138, in do_open
    raise URLError(err)
urllib.error.URLError: <urlopen error [Errno 1] _ssl.c:392: error:1411809D:SSL routines:SSL_CHECK_SERVERHELLO_TLSEXT:tls invalid ecpointformat list>
>>> 

Answer 1

What a coincidence! I'm having the same problem as you are, with an added complication: I'm behind a proxy. I found this bug report regarding https-not-working-with-urllib. Luckily, they posted a workaround.

import urllib.request
import ssl

##uncomment this code if you're behind a proxy
##https port is 443 but it doesn't work for me, used port 80 instead

##proxy_auth = '{0}://{1}:{2}@{3}'.format('https', 'username', 'password', 
##             'proxy:80')
##proxies = { 'https' : proxy_auth }
##proxy = urllib.request.ProxyHandler(proxies)
##proxy_auth_handler = urllib.request.HTTPBasicAuthHandler()
##opener = urllib.request.build_opener(proxy, proxy_auth_handler, 
##                                     https_sslv3_handler)

https_sslv3_handler = 
         urllib.request.HTTPSHandler(context=ssl.SSLContext(ssl.PROTOCOL_SSLv3))
opener = urllib.request.build_opener(https_sslv3_handler)
urllib.request.install_opener(opener)
resp = opener.open('https://yande.re/')
data = resp.read().decode('utf-8')
print(data)

Btw, thanks for showing how to use http.client. I didn't know that there's another library that can be used to connect to the internet. ;)