Opening Local File Works with urllib but not with urllib2

Question

I'm trying to open a local file using urllib2. How can I go about doing this? When I try the following line with urllib:

resp = urllib.urlopen(url) 

it works correctly, but when I switch it to:

resp = urllib2.urlopen(url) 

I get:

ValueError: unknown url type: /path/to/file 

where that file definitely does exit.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Just put "file://" in front of the path

>>> import urllib2 >>> urllib2.urlopen("file:///etc/debian_version").read() 'wheezy/sid\n' 

Answer 2

In urllib.urlopen method: If the URL parameter does not have a scheme identifier, it will opens a local file. but the urllib2 doesn't behave like this.

So, the urllib2 method can't process it.

It's always be good to include the 'file://' schema identifier in both of the method call for the url parameter.