Borked links
Surely there is some way to obtain the errorlevel in Python without having to catch an exception?
Probably, but would it be faster or simpler?
Simpler, certainly. Faster, I understand that unnecessary use of exceptions in C++ is inefficient, though I am unsure whether that applies to Python.
What's wrong with using an exception?
Python uses exceptions for error handling, and I think it's a more elegant way than having to check the return value against some arbitrary value that's defined as error and may be -1, 0, Null etc. depending on what the function is.
I meant that Blue should try to find some function in Python that just returned 404 or whatever if the link was broken, without raising an exception.
http://docs.python.org/library/httplib.html#httplib.HTTPResponse.status
That's what the pywikipediabot uses.