urllib on windows machines

Sat Dec 3 11:59:42 EST 2005

william at opensource4you.com wrote:
> I've got a strange problem on windows (not very familiar with that OS).
> I can ping a host, but cannot get it via urllib (see here under).
> .... Thus network seems good, but not for python ;-(.
> 
> Does any windows specialist can guide me (a poor linux user) to get
> Network functionalitiies with python on windows ?
> 
> I'm runnning on Windows XP (sorry to not give more, I don't know the
> equivalent of uname).

This part I can help you with:
     >>> import platform
     >>> platform.platform()
     'Windows-2000-5.0.2195-SP4'  # in my case
     >>> platform.architecture()
     ('32bit', 'WindowsPE')
     >>> platform.python_version()
     '2.4.2'
     >>> platform.python_compiler()
     'MSC v.1310 32 bit (Intel)'
     >>> platform.python_build()
     (67, 'Sep 28 2005 12:41:11')

> test.py contains the following lines:
> "
> import urllib
> g=urllib.urlopen('http://www.google.com')
> "
 > ...

I'm on a Win2K 2.4.2 system, and Idle let's me do:
     >>> import urllib
     >>> g = urllib.urlopen('http://www.google.com')
     >>> g.read(12)
     '<html><head>'

So off-hand, I'd suspect some firewall thingie is getting in the way.
Can you "bless" \Python24\python.exe and \Python24\pythonw.exe as
applications allowed to do net traffic?

--Scott David Daniels
scott.daniels at acm.org