No good way to tell when a timeout occurred

[jjlee]

Got: When you request a timeout using the timeout parameter to urlopen (or Browser.open), in order to tell that a timeout occurred, you have to use a poorly-defined interface like HTTPError.reason, using code like this:

import mechanize
import socket
br = mechanize.Browser()
try:
br.open("http://python.org/", timeout=0.001)
except mechanize.URLError, exc:
if isinstance(exc.reason, socket.timeout):
print "timeout occurred"

Expect: There's some clearly defined iinterface for finding out that a timeout imposed by module socket occurred.

[jjlee]

Here's that snippet again, I hope formatted correctly this time:

import mechanize
import socket
br = mechanize.Browser()
try:
    br.open("http://python.org/", timeout=0.001)
except mechanize.URLError, exc:
    if isinstance(exc.reason, socket.timeout):
        print "timeout occurred"

[jjlee]

This is an issue inherited from urllib2.