> >>> urlopen("http://www.kermitrose.com") > <addinfourl at 13510096 whose fp = <socket._fileobject object at > 0x00CDD768>>
> should I have assigned a name to the file by > website = urlopen(" http://www.kermitrose.com" ) ? Yes thats the idea. Its not really a file, but its what Python calls a "file-like object" That is it behaves like a file in that it has the same metjods and behaviour. It may not support all of the file methods but it will do the basics. > And I had not yet found out about the read function, so even if I had > understood that urlopen returned a file , I still would not have know > how to see the contents of that file. Did you look at the url2lib documentation? If you read it, it tells you that it returns a "file like object" Also at the bottom there is a link to a page full of examples. The first one is: ========================= 11.5.22 Examples This example gets the python.org main page and displays the first 100 bytes of it: >>> import urllib2 >>> f = urllib2.urlopen('http://www.python.org/') >>> print f.read(100) <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <?xml-stylesheet href="./css/ht2html ======================== Which shows how to open and read a web page. And if you went to the index and click 'f' you will find a link to 'file object' which gives you the list of methods you can call on file objects. (Admittedly not all of them work on file-like objects, but most will) I admit learning how to use the Python document set is not intuitive but it's worth persevering and the Module Index is invaluable. Alan G Author of the learn to program web tutor http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor