Waiting for receiving data

[Gerald Walker]

> 
> import socket
> from urllib2 import urlopen
> 
> # A one-hundredths of a second (0.01) timeout before socket throws
> # an exception to demonstrate catching the timeout.
> # Obviously, this you will set this greater than 0.01 in real life.
> socket.setdefaulttimeout(0.01)
> 
> # example xml feed
> xml_source = "http://mlb.mlb.com/partnerxml/gen/news/rss/mlb.xml"
> 
> try:
>   data = urlopen(xml_source)
> except urllib2.URLError, e:
>   print 'URLError = ' + str(e.reason)

Also, if you are using multiple threads to retrieve the xml source(s)
and any thread blocks due to network problems, the thread can go way by
itself after the default timeout expires.