timeout for urllib2.urlopen() in pre Python 2.6 versions

Question

The urllib2 documentation says that timeout parameter was added in Python 2.6. Unfortunately my code base has been running on Python 2.5 and 2.4 platforms.

Is there any alternate way to simulate the timeout? All I want to do is allow the code to talk the remote server for a fixed amount of time.

Perhaps any alternative built-in library? (Don't want install 3rd party, like pycurl)

Answer 1

I think your best choice is to patch (or deploy an local version of) your urllib2 with the change from the 2.6 maintenance branch

The file should be in /usr/lib/python2.4/urllib2.py (on linux and 2.4)

Answer 2

I use httplib from the standard library. It has a dead simple API, but only handles http as you might guess. IIUC urllib uses httplib to implement the http stuff.

Answer 3

you can set a global timeout for all socket operations (including HTTP requests) by using:

socket.setdefaulttimeout()

like this:

import urllib2
import socket
socket.setdefaulttimeout(30)
f = urllib2.urlopen('http://www.python.org/')

in this case, your urllib2 request would timeout after 30 secs and throw a socket exception. (this was added in Python 2.3)