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In Python, how do I use urllib to see if a website is 404 or 200?

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What would you use Urllib request for?

The urllib. request module defines functions and classes which help in opening URLs (mostly HTTP) in a complex world — basic and digest authentication, redirections, cookies and more. The Requests package is recommended for a higher-level HTTP client interface.

Does Python requests use Urllib?

In Python, cURL transfers requests and data to and from servers using PycURL. PycURL functions as an interface for the libcURL library within Python. Almost every programming language can use REST APIs to access an endpoint hosted on a web server.


The getcode() method (Added in python2.6) returns the HTTP status code that was sent with the response, or None if the URL is no HTTP URL.

>>> a=urllib.urlopen('http://www.google.com/asdfsf')
>>> a.getcode()
404
>>> a=urllib.urlopen('http://www.google.com/')
>>> a.getcode()
200

You can use urllib2 as well:

import urllib2

req = urllib2.Request('http://www.python.org/fish.html')
try:
    resp = urllib2.urlopen(req)
except urllib2.HTTPError as e:
    if e.code == 404:
        # do something...
    else:
        # ...
except urllib2.URLError as e:
    # Not an HTTP-specific error (e.g. connection refused)
    # ...
else:
    # 200
    body = resp.read()

Note that HTTPError is a subclass of URLError which stores the HTTP status code.


For Python 3:

import urllib.request, urllib.error

url = 'http://www.google.com/asdfsf'
try:
    conn = urllib.request.urlopen(url)
except urllib.error.HTTPError as e:
    # Return code error (e.g. 404, 501, ...)
    # ...
    print('HTTPError: {}'.format(e.code))
except urllib.error.URLError as e:
    # Not an HTTP-specific error (e.g. connection refused)
    # ...
    print('URLError: {}'.format(e.reason))
else:
    # 200
    # ...
    print('good')

import urllib2

try:
    fileHandle = urllib2.urlopen('http://www.python.org/fish.html')
    data = fileHandle.read()
    fileHandle.close()
except urllib2.URLError, e:
    print 'you got an error with the code', e