# `urllib.error` — Exception classes raised by urllib.request

Source code: Lib/urllib/error.py

The `urllib.error` module defines the exception classes for exceptions raised by `urllib.request`. The base exception class is `URLError`.

The following exceptions are raised by `urllib.error` as appropriate:

exception urllib.error.URLError

  The handlers raise this exception (or derived exceptions) when they run into a problem. It is a subclass of `OSError`.

  reason

    The reason for this error. It can be a message string or another exception instance.

  Changed in version 3.3: `URLError` used to be a subtype of `IOError`, which is now an alias of `OSError`.

exception urllib.error.HTTPError(url, code, msg, hdrs, fp)

  Though being an exception (a subclass of `URLError`), an `HTTPError` can also function as a non-exceptional file-like return value (the same thing that `urlopen()` returns). This is useful when handling exotic HTTP errors, such as requests for authentication.

  url

    Contains the request URL. An alias for filename attribute.

  code

    An HTTP status code as defined in RFC 2616. This numeric value corresponds to a value found in the dictionary of codes as found in `http.server.BaseHTTPRequestHandler.responses`.

  reason

    This is usually a string explaining the reason for this error. An alias for msg attribute.

  headers

    The HTTP response headers for the HTTP request that caused the `HTTPError`. An alias for hdrs attribute.

    Added in version 3.4.

  fp

    A file-like object where the HTTP error body can be read from.

exception urllib.error.ContentTooShortError(msg, content)

  This exception is raised when the `urlretrieve()` function detects that the amount of the downloaded data is less than the expected amount (given by the Content-Length header).

  content

    The downloaded (and supposedly truncated) data.