urllib2.urlopen will hang forever despite of timeout

Question

Hope this is quite a simple question, but it's driving me crazy. I'm using Python 2.7.3 on an out of the box installation of ubuntu 12.10 server. I kept zooming on the problem until I got to this snippet:

import urllib2
x=urllib2.urlopen("http://casacinema.eu/movie-film-Matrix+trilogy+123+streaming-6165.html", timeout=5)

It simply hangs forever, never goes on timeout. I'm evidently doing something wrong. Anybody could please help? Thank you very much indeed!

Matteo

Answer 1

Looks like you are experiencing the proxy issue. Here's a great explanation on how to workaround it: Trying to access the Internet using urllib2 in Python.

I've executed your code on my ubuntu with python 2.7.3 and haven't seen any errors.

Also, consider using requests:

import requests

response = requests.get("http://casacinema.eu/movie-film-Matrix+trilogy+123+streaming-6165.html", timeout=5)
print response.status_code

See also:

• Proxies with Python 'Requests' module