"HTTP error -1" from urllib2

[John Nagle]

    The crash is a known bug, and is fixed in the Subversion repository,
but not in any released version.  The problem is that if the server
returns an blank line, instead of "HTTP 1", httplib goes off into
some old HTTP 0.9 code that's broken.

				John Nagle

John Nagle wrote:
>    I'm getting a wierd error from urllib2 when opening certain
> URLs.  The code works for most sites, but not all of them.
> Here's the traceback:
> 
> [Thread-2] InfoSitePage EXCEPTION while processing page 
> "http://www.fourmilab.ch": Problem with page "http://www.fourmilab.ch": 
> HTTP
>  error -1 - ..
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "D:\projects\sitetruth\InfoSitePage.py", line 318, in httpfetch
>     fd = url_opener.open(self.requestedurl)             # open file by url
>   File "D:\projects\sitetruth\miscutils.py", line 149, in open
>     result = urllib.FancyURLopener.open(self, url, *args)
>   File "D:\python24\lib\urllib.py", line 190, in open
>     return getattr(self, name)(url)
>   File "D:\python24\lib\urllib.py", line 322, in open_http
>     return self.http_error(url, fp, errcode, errmsg, headers)
>   File "D:\python24\lib\urllib.py", line 339, in http_error
>     return self.http_error_default(url, fp, errcode, errmsg, headers)
>   File "D:\projects\sitetruth\miscutils.py", line 144, in 
> http_error_default
>     raise InfoException.InfoException(self.url, 'HTTP error %s - %s.' % 
> (errcode, errmsg))
> InfoException: Problem with page "http://www.fourmilab.ch": HTTP error 
> -1 - ..
> 
> This fails identically using Python 2.4 on a Windows desktop and on 
> Python 2.5
> on a Linux server.
> 
> The site being accessed reads fine in a browser.  It's not a redirect, 
> and it doesn't insist on cookies.
> 
> See "http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2005-March/314301.html"
> for another problem involving "HTTP error -1".
> 
>                     John Nagle