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

Question

How to get the code of the headers through urllib?

Neona

Answer 1

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

Seamark

To use in python 3, just use from urllib.request import urlopen. – Normalcy

In python 3.4, if there is a 404, urllib.request.urlopen returns a urllib.error.HTTPError. – Athos

Doesn't work in python 2.7. If the HTTP returns 400, an exception is thrown – Dorothi

Answer 2

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.

Tetroxide

Is the second else a mistake? – Weichsel

@NadavB The exception object 'e' will look like a response object. That is, it's file-like and you can 'read' the payload from it. – Tetroxide

Answer 3

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')

Opinionated

For URLError print(e.reason) could be used. – Sines

What about http.client.HTTPException? – Kendy

How can I check for a 301 or 302? – Rhizome

Answer 4

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

Peculiarity

TIMEX is interested in grabbing the http request code (200, 404, 500, etc) not a generic error thrown by urllib2. – Inearth