EC
http.client.HTTPException
PythonERRORNotableNetwork

Low-level HTTP protocol error

Quick Answer

Catch http.client.HTTPException for low-level HTTP protocol errors; switch to the requests library for higher-level error handling in production code.

Production Risk

Medium.

What this means

Base class for all exceptions raised by http.client (the low-level HTTP library). Covers malformed responses, incomplete reads, and invalid headers — situations where the remote server violated the HTTP protocol.

Why it happens
  1. 1Server closed the connection before sending a complete response
  2. 2Response contains malformed headers
  3. 3Chunked transfer encoding is corrupted

Fix

Catch HTTPException and retry

Catch HTTPException and retry
import http.client
import time

def fetch(host, path, retries=3):
    for attempt in range(retries):
        try:
            conn = http.client.HTTPSConnection(host, timeout=10)
            conn.request('GET', path)
            return conn.getresponse().read()
        except http.client.HTTPException as e:
            if attempt == retries - 1:
                raise
            time.sleep(2 ** attempt)

Why this works

Exponential back-off handles transient connection-reset and incomplete-read errors from overloaded servers.

Code examples
Common subclassespython
# http.client exception hierarchy:
# HTTPException
#   NotConnected
#   InvalidURL
#   UnknownProtocol
#   UnknownTransferEncoding
#   UnimplementedFileMode
#   IncompleteRead
#   ImproperConnectionState
#   BadStatusLine
#   LineTooLong
Sources

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