Using URLOpen to read data from websites

This recipe shows how we can easily read entire webpages by using Python's built-in modules. We will display the webpage 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 are wrapping 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 then can catch. Once we have caught the exception we can decide what to do next.

There...