Peter Hansen wrote: > Kevin wrote: > > Can you tell me what to look for in an HTTPMessage that is an error? I > > have looked at the header objects and I cannot determine an error > > message. > > I think you're missing most of the context and detail that would help us > provide a useful answer for you.
Here's some of your own medicine. ;-) A Google search for "HTTPMessage Python" produced a link to the surprisingly helpful "urllib2 - The Missing Manual" [1]. This states that the result of urlopen can be queried using the info method; for example: import urllib2 try: f = urllib2.urlopen(some_url) message = f.info() except urllib2.HTTPError, exc: message = exc.info() One would guess that the status attribute on the above message object would yield some kind of descriptive response from the server, noting that the response code from the server is itself typically found as the code attribute on either the f or exc objects manipulated in the above example. However, my limited experiments show that status is typically set to the empty string, although a perusal of the source code for httplib reveals that the status attribute is only used to signal exceptional conditions in the processing of responses, and I would guess that most HTTP interactions wouldn't result in anything special being put in that attribute. I suppose what one could do is to examine f.code or exc.code and then interpret that value accordingly (see the httplib module for the HTTP response code constants) possibly generating a suitable message, although the only place in the standard library that helps here is the BaseHTTPRequestHandler class: import BaseHTTPServer message, description = \ BaseHTTPServer.BaseHTTPRequestHandler.responses[f.code] Paul P.S. It's a shame that the time spent by various other contributors in making unhelpful remarks in response to the original, albeit imprecise query wasn't spent in offering just a little helpful advice instead. I guess such horseplay is how the Python community gets its "arrogant" label... [1] http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/articles/urllib2.shtml -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list