Hello !

In a code of mine if have the lines :
try:
  req = urllib2.Request(url)
  u = urllib2.urlopen(req)
  data=u.read()
except urllib2.URLError,err:
  // error handling here

The urllib2.URLError normally catchs the 
socket.timeout but someone send me a bug report of a 
tiemout error :

File "/usr/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 285, in read
data = self._sock.recv(recv_size)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/httplib.py", line 460, in read
return self._read_chunked(amt)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/httplib.py", line 495, in
_read_chunked
line = self.fp.readline()
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 325, in
readline
data = recv(1)
socket.timeout: timed out

Is it a bug with httplib and 'Content-Encoding: 
chunked' header ?

urlopen() raises URLError, .read() may raise other errors.  I don't
think that's a bug in itself, though no doubt:

 1. The documentation of exceptions raised could and should be improved
 2. The exceptions that can be raised are likely still inconsistent
(though this has improved in Python 2.6, I think)

Recommend closing this bug.

Please open other bugs about the issues above if you have patches.

Should this one be closed and docs discussed in a new one? Volunteers? :)

I agree.