[Python-Dev] urllib.urlretrieve() and handling 550 errors when reading from FTP (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Mon Jul 12 05:55:39 CEST 2004

> Why should I have to use a trailing backslash to get a directory > listing? That's not in the FTP standard and probably won't work > everywhere.

It's the way the code is written for the FTP wrapper in urllib; has nothing to do with ftp.python.org or FTP. Basically the code checks to see if there is a trailing slash. If it does it assumes it is a directory and thus only requests a listing of the path from the server.

Ah, right. Sorry. Alzheimer is setting in early today. :-)

Otherwise it tries to get the file. If that get fails (with a 550) it then decides to try getting a listing for the path. If that works it returns that, otherwise it completely fails.

Basically I don't think there is a way to make this work for urllib nicely.

Depends on what you call nicely. I think of the current behavior as "nice", because directories are a lot more common that files you can't read in the typical ftp setup.

If no one has any objections I will just clarify the docs stating that if an attempt to get a file fails on a 550 error (and of course I will say what that means) it will then try a LIST command and if that succeeds that is what is returned. And if you need more fine-grained control then use ftplib.

Sounds good to me. Thanks!

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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