How to handle urllib's timeout in Python 3?

Question

First off, my problem is quite similar to this one. I would like a timeout of urllib.urlopen() to generate an exception that I can handle.

Doesn't this fall under URLError?

try:
    response = urllib.request.urlopen(url, timeout=10).read().decode('utf-8')
except (HTTPError, URLError) as error:
    logging.error(
        'Data of %s not retrieved because %s\nURL: %s', name, error, url)
else:
    logging.info('Access successful.')

The error message:

resp = urllib.request.urlopen(req, timeout=10).read().decode('utf-8')
File "/usr/lib/python3.2/urllib/request.py", line 138, in urlopen
return opener.open(url, data, timeout)
File "/usr/lib/python3.2/urllib/request.py", line 369, in open
response = self._open(req, data)
File "/usr/lib/python3.2/urllib/request.py", line 387, in _open
'_open', req)
File "/usr/lib/python3.2/urllib/request.py", line 347, in _call_chain
result = func(*args)
File "/usr/lib/python3.2/urllib/request.py", line 1156, in http_open
return self.do_open(http.client.HTTPConnection, req)
File "/usr/lib/python3.2/urllib/request.py", line 1141, in do_open
r = h.getresponse()
File "/usr/lib/python3.2/http/client.py", line 1046, in getresponse
response.begin()
File "/usr/lib/python3.2/http/client.py", line 346, in begin
version, status, reason = self._read_status()
File "/usr/lib/python3.2/http/client.py", line 308, in _read_status
line = str(self.fp.readline(_MAXLINE + 1), "iso-8859-1")
File "/usr/lib/python3.2/socket.py", line 276, in readinto
return self._sock.recv_into(b)
socket.timeout: timed out

There was a major change from in Python 3 when they re-organised the urllib and urllib2 modules into urllib. Is it possible that there was a change then that causes this?

Answer 1

The exception is timeout from socket, so

from socket import timeout
try:
    response = urllib.request.urlopen(url, timeout=10).read().decode('utf-8')
except (HTTPError, URLError) as error:
    logging.error('Data of %s not retrieved because %s\nURL: %s', name, error, url)
except timeout:
    logging.error('socket timed out - URL %s', url)
else:
    logging.info('Access successful.')

should catch the new exception.