urllib2.URLError: <urlopen error unknown url type: c>

Question

I am using the below code to scrape over XFN content from web page http://ajaxian.com but I am gatting the below error:

    Traceback (most recent call last):  File      "C:\Users\Somnath\workspace\us.chakra.social.web.microformat\src\microformats_xfn_scrape.py", line 40, in <module>
page = urllib2.urlopen(URL)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\urllib2.py", line 126, in urlopen
return _opener.open(url, data, timeout)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\urllib2.py", line 394, in open
response = self._open(req, data)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\urllib2.py", line 417, in _open
'unknown_open', req)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\urllib2.py", line 372, in _call_chain
result = func(*args)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\urllib2.py", line 1232, in unknown_open
raise URLError('unknown url type: %s' % type)
urllib2.URLError: <urlopen error unknown url type: c>

My code is as follows:

'''
Created on Jan 11, 2013

@author: Somnath
'''
# Scraping XFN content from a web page
# -*-coding: utf-8 -*-

import sys
import urllib2
import HTMLParser
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

# Try http://ajaxian.com
URL = sys.argv[0]

XFN_TAGS = set([
            'colleague',
            'sweetheart',
            'parent',
            'co-resident',
            'co-worker',
            'muse',
            'neighbor',
            'sibling',
            'kin',
            'child',
            'date',
            'spouse',
            'me',
            'acquaintance',
            'met',
            'crush',
            'contact',
            'friend',
            ])


#try:
page = urllib2.urlopen(URL)
#except urllib2.URLError:
#    print 'Failed to fetch ' + item

#try:
soup = BeautifulSoup(page)
#except HTMLParser.HTMLParseError:
#    print 'Failed to parse ' + item

anchorTags = soup.findAll('a')

for a in anchorTags:
    if a.has_key('rel'):
        if len(set(a['rel'].split()) & XFN_TAGS) > 0:
            tags = a['rel'].split()
            print a.contents[0], a['href'], tags

I am running PyDev under Eclipse and is using Run As --> Python Run and set the Runtime Configuration with argument "http://ajaxian.com/". Can anybody suggest where I am getting wrong?

One more thing: I have commented the two try blocks in my code because it was giving an error undefined variable : item. If I want to re-include the try-except blocks, should I give a blank definition of variable, item outside the try blocks? How can I get rid of that problem?

Answer 1

As you suggested sys.argv[0] prints the path of your script, that is because you call your script like

python microformats_xfn‌​_scrape.py <some_argument>

and here index 0 of sys.argv is the name of the script and not the argument.

What you need to do is call your script with the <url> parameter, like :

python microformats_xfn‌​_scrape.py http://www.ajaxian.com/

and in your script change sys.argv[0] to sys.argv[1] as url arguments index is 1.