USe urllib2 which will fail with an exception. You can trap this exception and using the code attribute of the exception object, determine why it failed. The error code for 'authentication required' is 401.
Off the top of my head : import urllib2 req = urllib2.Request(theurl) try: handle = urllib2.urlopen(req) except IOError, e: if not e.hasattr('code'): print 'The url appears to be invalid.' print e.reason else: if e.code == 401: print theurl, 'is protected with a password.' else: print 'We failed with error code', e.code HTH Regards, Fuzzy http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/index.shtml -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list