urllib.urlopen unwanted password prompts - documentation problem

[John J. Lee]

John Nagle <nagle at animats.com> writes:

>    If you try to open a password protected page with "urllib.urlopen()", you get
> 
> 	"Enter username for EnterPassword at example.com:"
> 
> on standard output, followed by a read for input!  This seems to be an
> undocumented feature, if not a bug.  Definitely the documentation for
> "urllib" should mention this.  The effects of this in a CGI program
> are not good. 	
> 
> A workaround is described here: "http://cis.poly.edu/cs912/urlopen.txt"
> "URLopener" and "FancyURLopener" in urllib have many overrideable
> functions, none of which are documented at python.org and should be.
[...]

Bug reports tend not to result in a fix being applied unless the
reporter him/herself actually goes to the trouble of filing a patch at
sourceforge.net :

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=5470&atid=305470


John