Overriding urllib2.HTTPError or urllib.error.HTTPError and reading response HTML anyway

Question

I receive a 'HTTP Error 500: Internal Server Error' response, but I still want to read the data inside the error HTML.

With Python 2.6, I normally fetch a page using:

import urllib2
url = "http://google.com"
data = urllib2.urlopen(url)
data = data.read()

When attempting to use this on the failing URL, I get the exception urllib2.HTTPError:

urllib2.HTTPError: HTTP Error 500: Internal Server Error

How can I fetch such error pages (with or without urllib2), all while they are returning Internal Server Errors?

Note that with Python 3, the corresponding exception is urllib.error.HTTPError.

Answer 1

The HTTPError is a file-like object. You can catch it and then read its contents.

try:
    resp = urllib2.urlopen(url)
    contents = resp.read()
except urllib2.HTTPError, error:
    contents = error.read()