[Tutor] fetching wikipedia articles

[Alan Gauld]

"Kent Johnson" <kent37 at tds.net> wrote

>> Rather than editing the existing code and making it non standard
>> why not subclass robotparser:

> That won't work, it is urllib.URLOpener() that he is patching and

Sorry, yes I misread that post as modifying robotparser, it
should have been URLOpener.

But...

> robotparser does not supply a way to change the URLOpener subclass
> that it uses.

I didn't realize that. So you would need to cut n' paste the 
robotparser
read() method into a subclass of robotparser too. Which is almost
as messy as editing the original source. Such a shame that the
author didn't either put the opener as an attribute or as a defaulted
parameter of read!

Pity, I hate to see editing of existing classes in an OO system.

Alan G.