How can I read the contents of an URL with Python?

Question

The following works when I paste it on the browser:

http://www.somesite.com/details.pl?urn=2344

But when I try reading the URL with Python nothing happens:

 link = 'http://www.somesite.com/details.pl?urn=2344'
 f = urllib.urlopen(link)           
 myfile = f.readline()  
 print myfile

Do I need to encode the URL, or is there something I'm not seeing?

Answer 1

To answer your question:

import urllib

link = "http://www.somesite.com/details.pl?urn=2344"
f = urllib.urlopen(link)
myfile = f.read()
print(myfile)

You need to read(), not readline()

EDIT (2018-06-25): Since Python 3, the legacy urllib.urlopen() was replaced by urllib.request.urlopen() (see notes from https://docs.python.org/3/library/urllib.request.html#urllib.request.urlopen for details).

If you're using Python 3, see answers by Martin Thoma or i.n.n.m within this question: https://stackoverflow.com/a/28040508/158111 (Python 2/3 compat) https://stackoverflow.com/a/45886824/158111 (Python 3)

Or, just get this library here: http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/ and seriously use it :)

import requests

link = "http://www.somesite.com/details.pl?urn=2344"
f = requests.get(link)
print(f.text)