Helper function to grab web pages with urllib2. Returns content of the page if retrieval was successful, None otherwise.

getpage.py

import urllib2

def getpage(url):
    """
    Helper function to grab web pages with urllib2

    returns content of the page if retrieval was successful, None otherwise
    """
    req = urllib2.Request(url)
    req.add_header('User-Agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/17.0')

    try:
        response = urllib2.urlopen(req)
    except urllib2.URLError as e:
        if hasattr(e, 'reason'):
            print 'We failed to reach a server.'
            print 'Reason: ', e.reason
        elif hasattr(e, 'code'):
            print 'The server couldn\'t fulfill the request.'
            print 'Error code: ', e.code
        return None
    else:
        return response.read()