Using urlopen to read data from websites

This recipe shows how we can easily read entire web pages by using Python's built-in modules. We will display the web page data first in its raw format and then decode it, and then we will display it in our GUI.

Getting ready

We will read the data from a webpage and then display it in the ScrolledText widget of our GUI.

How to do it…

First, we create a new Python module and name it URL.py. We then import the required functionality to read webpages using Python. We can do this in very few lines of code.

We wrap our code in a try...except block similar to Java and C#. This is a modern approach to coding, which Python supports. Whenever we have code that might not complete, we can experiment with this code and, if it works, all is fine. If the block of code in the try...except block does not work, the Python interpreter will throw one of several possible exceptions, which we can then catch. Once we have caught the exception, we can decide what to do next...