Can't get urlopen in Python 2.7 to work

Question

I'm trying to follow the suggestions from this thread, but its not working. At this point, I just wanted to perform a very simple test to make sure that I was actually getting the data returned from the site I'm trying to open. For my simple test I was trying to open the Yahoo weather api. I've verified that typing in this address in a web browser does indeed return data. I've tried both of these code snippets and neither one is working.

import urllib

params = urllib.urlencode({'w': 2482950})
f = urllib.urlopen("http://weather.yahooapis.com/forecastrss?%s" % params)
print f.read()

This example came straight from the Python website. This dies with:

IOError: [Errno socket error] [Errno 110] Connection timed out

I also tried using httplib like this:

import httplib

conn = httplib.HTTPConnection(host='weather.yahooapis.com', timeout=10)
req = '/forecastrss?w=2482950'
try:
    conn.request('GET',req)
except:
    print "Didn't work"

content = conn.getresponse().read()
print content

Trying this gives me the following error:

  self.fp = sock.makefile('rb', 0)
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'makefile'

It appears that I'm not ever making the connection to the remote host. Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

Answer 1

The problem was indeed the firewall. I added the following code to get it to work:

proxy_support = urllib2.ProxyHandler({"http":"http://<proxy>:<port>"})
opener = urllib2.build_opener(proxy_support)
urllib2.install_opener(opener)

html = urllib2.urlopen(url).read()
print html