[compat] Add compat_urllib_request_Request

[youtube-dl] / youtube_dl / compat.py

diff --git a/youtube_dl/compat.py b/youtube_dl/compat.py
index 2d43ec852ca2cfa41cf702fb7aac28fbee11bec6..4e3de7f5170022bbab637b8163cd0d67cc00719e 100644 (file)
--- a/youtube_dl/compat.py
+++ b/youtube_dl/compat.py
@@ -198,6 +198,14 @@ except ImportError:  # Python < 3.4
 
             return compat_urllib_response.addinfourl(io.BytesIO(data), headers, url)
 
+
+# Prepend protocol-less URLs with `http:` scheme in order to mitigate the number of
+# unwanted failures due to missing protocol
+def compat_urllib_request_Request(url, *args, **kwargs):
+    return compat_urllib_request.Request(
+        'http:%s' % url if url.startswith('//') else url, *args, **kwargs)
+
+
 try:
     compat_basestring = basestring  # Python 2
 except NameError:
@@ -216,8 +224,8 @@ except ImportError:  # Python 2.6
 if sys.version_info[0] >= 3:
     compat_etree_fromstring = xml.etree.ElementTree.fromstring
 else:
-    # on python 2.x the attributes and text of a node aren't always unicode
-    # objects
+    # python 2.x tries to encode unicode strings with ascii (see the
+    # XMLParser._fixtext method)
     etree = xml.etree.ElementTree
 
     try: