urllib error on urlopen

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Wed, 24 Sep 2008 08:46:56 -0700, Mike Driscoll wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I have been using the following code for over a year in one of my
> programs:
> 
> f = urllib2.urlopen('https://www.companywebsite.com/somestring')
> 
> It worked great until the middle of the afternoon yesterday. Now I get
> the following traceback:
...
> URLError: <urlopen error (1, 'error:140770FC:SSL
> routines:SSL23_GET_SERVER_HELLO:unknown protocol')>

Have you recently set a proxy where Python can auto-detect it? I 
understand that urllib2 doesn't work well with https proxies.

If so, you can instruct urllib2 not to use a proxy-handler, but it's more 
work. What I do is construct an opener without a proxyhandler:


# untested...
no_proxy_support = urllib2.ProxyHandler({})
opener = urllib2.build_opener(no_proxy_support)
f = opener.open('https://www.companywebsite.com/somestring')


If that doesn't work, you may need to build a Request object from the URL 
before passing it to opener.open.



-- 
Steven