python - urllib2 not retrieving entire HTTP response

Question

I'm perplexed as to why I'm not able to download the entire contents of some JSON responses from FriendFeed using urllib2.

>>> import urllib2
>>> stream = urllib2.urlopen('http://friendfeed.com/api/room/the-life-scientists/profile?format=json')
>>> stream.headers['content-length']
'168928'
>>> data = stream.read()
>>> len(data)
61058
>>> # We can see here that I did not retrieve the full JSON
... # given that the stream doesn't end with a closing }
... 
>>> data[-40:]
'ce2-003048343a40","name":"Vincent Racani'

How can I retrieve the full response with urllib2?

Answer 1

Best way to get all of the data:

fp = urllib2.urlopen("http://www.example.com/index.cfm")

response = ""
while 1:
    data = fp.read()
    if not data:         # This might need to be    if data == "":   -- can't remember
        break
    response += data

print response

The reason is that .read() isn't guaranteed to return the entire response, given the nature of sockets. I thought this was discussed in the documentation (maybe urllib) but I cannot find it.