[Python-talk] New Kent's Korner: urllib2 cookbook

[Kent Johnson]

Lloyd Kvam wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-03-25 at 06:23 -0400, Kent Johnson wrote:
>> Draft notes for the next Kent's Korner presentation are available at
>> http://personalpages.tds.net/~kent37/kk/00010.html
>>
>> Comments welcome.
> Looks good.  If you want to check that a web site is functioning, the
> loss of status information mentioned at the end (Other Resources
> section) is a killer.

Maybe I gave the wrong impression. The status response from the request 
that is returned, is available in f.code. This should be plenty for 
checking for a functioning web site. But imagine this scenario:

GET /some/old/location
Returns 301 - permanent redirect - to /new/location

GET /new/location
Returns 200

The two requests occur in a single call to urlopen(). f.code will be 
200. f.geturl() will be /new/location, so you can detect that a redirect 
took place, but there is no way to distinguish a 301 (permanent) from 
302 (temp) redirect. The handler in feedparser remembers the *original* 
code as well as the final one.

Kent