[Python-Dev] Re: urllib.urlretrieve (original) (raw)

Fredrik Lundh fredrik at pythonware.com
Fri Aug 27 09:45:02 CEST 2004

David Abrahams wrote:

sourceforge is known to have reliability problems when downloading large files. here's a wget session on my machine (okay, it's not a silent truncation, but SF is clearly not well): Okay, that tells me something... but shouldn't urllib throw an exception in case of a problem... or shouldn't it do something to retry?

from the HTTP speification:

HTTP/1.1 user agents MUST notify the user when an invalid
length is received and detected.

is urllib a user agent? or is that better left to your application?

file, headers = urllib.urlretrieve(...)
if os.path.getsize(file) != int(headers.get("content-length", 0)):
    print "oops!"

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