What is wrong with my Python code and how can I fix it?

Question

Here is my code

import requests
ping = requests.get('http://example.com')
ping.status_code

if ping.status_code==200:
    print ("Online")
else:
    print ("Offline")

It pings http://example.com. When the website is online it successfully prints Online. when the website is offline, I want it to print Offline but instead it is showing me a huge error message ends with this line

Max retries exceeded with url: / (Caused by NewConnectionError('<urllib3.connection.HTTPConnection object at 0x7fd3f17372e8>: Failed to establish a new connection: [Errno -2] Name or service not known',))

How can I fix it to successfully print Offline if the website is offline?

I would think you need to use a try catch, and if you catch an exception you know it is offline, otherwise it is online — Bentaye, Mar 06 '19 at 14:46
Possible duplicate of [Correct way to try/except using Python requests module?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16511337/correct-way-to-try-except-using-python-requests-module) — meowgoesthedog, Mar 06 '19 at 14:46
You might want to wrap your call to the `get` function inside a `try-except` block to handle this case. — Thomas Lang, Mar 06 '19 at 14:46

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 06 '19 at 14:50

1

You're getting an error on request itself.

ping = requests.get('http://example.com')

So you don't get a status code if server didn't respond you. If you want to check if host is down it's worth using exception handling so when request fails your script doesn't go down with an error. Following code should work.

import requests
try:
    ping = requests.get('http://example.com')
    print ("Online")
except:
    print ("Offline")

answered Mar 06 '19 at 14:50

Volodymyr Vyshnevskyi

316
1
11

always welcome. worth saying that with this particular script - if website responds with any error (like 500, 404 etc) script will still respond with "Online". So you probably should still include your status_code checks. – Volodymyr Vyshnevskyi Mar 06 '19 at 15:03

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 06 '19 at 14:55

You can do this by modifying your code as below:

Adding try and except mechanism.

import requests
try:
    ping = requests.get('http://example.com')
    ping.status_code

    if ping.status_code==200:
        print ("Online")
    else:
        print ("Offline")
except requests.exceptions.ConnectionError as e:
    print("Offline")

What is wrong with my Python code and how can I fix it?

2 Answers2