Python urllib2 exception nonnumeric port: 'port/'

Question

I wanted to execute this code I found on the python website:

    #!/usr/bin/python

import urllib2

f = urllib2.urlopen('http://www.python.org/')
print f.read(100)

but the result was this:

    Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "WebServiceAusführen.py", line 5, in <module>
    f = urllib2.urlopen('http://www.python.org/')
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 126, in urlopen
    return _opener.open(url, data, timeout)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 400, in open
    response = self._open(req, data)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 418, in _open
    '_open', req)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 378, in _call_chain
    result = func(*args)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 1207, in http_open
    return self.do_open(httplib.HTTPConnection, req)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 1146, in do_open
    h = http_class(host, timeout=req.timeout) # will parse host:port
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/httplib.py", line 693, in __init__
    self._set_hostport(host, port)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/httplib.py", line 721, in _set_hostport
    raise InvalidURL("nonnumeric port: '%s'" % host[i+1:])
httplib.InvalidURL: nonnumeric port: 'port/'
Error in sys.excepthook:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/apport_python_hook.py", line 70, in apport_excepthook
    binary = os.path.realpath(os.path.join(os.getcwdu(), sys.argv[0]))
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/posixpath.py", line 71, in join
    path += '/' + b
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 15: ordinal not in range(128)

Original exception was:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "WebServiceAusführen.py", line 5, in <module>
    f = urllib2.urlopen('http://www.python.org/')
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 126, in urlopen
    return _opener.open(url, data, timeout)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 400, in open
    response = self._open(req, data)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 418, in _open
    '_open', req)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 378, in _call_chain
    result = func(*args)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 1207, in http_open
    return self.do_open(httplib.HTTPConnection, req)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 1146, in do_open
    h = http_class(host, timeout=req.timeout) # will parse host:port
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/httplib.py", line 693, in __init__
    self._set_hostport(host, port)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/httplib.py", line 721, in _set_hostport
    raise InvalidURL("nonnumeric port: '%s'" % host[i+1:])
httplib.InvalidURL: nonnumeric port: 'port/'

help would be pretty awesome because I really don't know how to make such a big error in such a small program!

Answer 1

The exception is thrown because you have a faulty proxy configuration.

On POSIX systems, the library looks for *_proxy environment variables (upper and lowercase). For a HTTP URL, that's the http_proxy environment variable.

You can verify this by looking for proxy variables:

import os

print {k: v for k, v in os.environ.items() if k.lower().endswith('_proxy')}

Whatever value you have configured on your system is not a valid hostname and port combination and Python is choking on that.