urllib2 to string

Question

I'm using urllib2 to open a url. Now I need the html file as a string. How do I do this?

Answer 1

The easiest way would be:

f = urllib2.urlopen("http://example.com/foo/bar")
s = f.read()
# s now holds the contents of the site

There is more information in the urllib2 docs.

urlopen() returns a file-like object, so Python's file object methods work.

Answer 2

Python 2.6.5 (r265:79359, Mar 24 2010, 01:32:55) 
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5493)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import urllib2
>>> s = urllib2.urlopen('http://www.google.com').read()
>>> s
<big long string here>