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Naive
Asked: 2013-09-23 21:19:01 +0800 CST

Why does my Python script fail with syntax errors?

  • 772

While running the simple Python program below, I'm getting the following error:

./url_test.py: line 2: syntax error near unexpected token `('                  
./url_test.py: line 2: `response = urllib2.urlopen('http://python.org/')'

import urllib2      
response = urllib2.urlopen('http://python.org/')  
print "Response:", response

# Get the URL. This gets the real URL. 
print "The URL is: ", response.geturl()

# Getting the code
print "This gets the code: ", response.code

# Get the Headers. 
# This returns a dictionary-like object that describes the page fetched, 
# particularly the headers sent by the server
print "The Headers are: ", response.info()

# Get the date part of the header
print "The Date is: ", response.info()['date']

# Get the server part of the header
print "The Server is: ", response.info()['server']

# Get all data
html = response.read()
print "Get all data: ", html

# Get only the length
print "Get the length :", len(html)

# Showing that the file object is iterable
for line in response:
 print line.rstrip()

# Note that the rstrip strips the trailing newlines and carriage returns before
# printing the output.
command-line

2 Answers

  1. Those errors are not typical Python tracebacks. Those errors look like shell errors.

    I think you are trying to run a Python script with Bash (or an another shell), i.e. you are doing something like:

    bash url_test.py

    Instead, you should use:

    python url_test.py
    • 9
  2. Best Answer

    You missed to add a shebang at the beginning of the script to tell the shell to interpret your script as a python script. Something like this:

    #!/usr/bin/python

    or:

    #!/usr/bin/env python

    See also: Why do people write #!/usr/bin/env python on the first line of a Python script?

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