CGI with URL problem

[rodmc]

-- sorry if this has shown up twice, but my browser crashed and ended
up posting the message when I hit the space bar for some odd reason.
Also it was not quite ready.

Hi,

I am writing a small CGI app which tests if another webpage exists,
the pages are on a Wiki system. Anyway when I run the same function
(see below) from within IDLE it is ok, however when it is run from
within the CGI script I get a socket error::

"URLError:
      reason = <socket.error instance>"

I am not quite sure what is causing this, is there a special way of
dealing with such things from within CGI script? I have pasted the
offending function below, along with only the import statement which
relates to that function.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Kind regards,

rod

>From the CGI version:

from urllib2 import urlopen as urlopen

def urlexists(url):
        path="http://x.y.z/wiki/index.php?title="+url
        sock = urlopen(path)
        page=sock.read()
        if "There is currently no text in this page" in page:
                return True
        else:
                return False

Ammended IDLE version:

from urllib2 import urlopen as urlopen
import os,sys

def urlexists(url):
        path="http://x.y.z/wiki/index.php?title="+url
        sock = urlopen(path)
        page=sock.read()
        if "There is currently no text in this page" in page:
                print "found"
                return True
        else:
                print "not found"
                return False

if __name__=="__main__":
    urlexists("cheese_test")