Simple Question : files and URLLIB

[Richard Shea]

Hi - I'm new to Python. I've been trying to use URLLIB and the 'tidy'
function (part of the mx.tidy package). There's one thing I'm having
real difficulties understanding. When I did this ...

finA= urllib.urlopen('http://www.python.org/')
foutA=open('C:\\testout.html','w')
tidy(finA,foutA,None)

I get ...

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<interactive input>", line 1, in ?
  File "mx\Tidy\Tidy.py", line 38, in tidy
    return mxTidy.tidy(input, output, errors, kws)
TypeError: inputstream must be a file object or string

... what I don't understand is surely the result of a urllib is a file
object ? Isn't it ? To quote the manual at :

http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/module-urllib.html

"If all went well, a file-like object is returned". I can make the
tidy function happy but changing the code to read ...

finA= urllib.urlopen('http://www.python.org/').read()

... I haven't had time to look into this properly yet but I suspect
finA is now a string not a file handle ?

Anyway if anyone can throw light on this I would be grateful.

thanks

richard.shea.