Yak Shaving

I was having issues getting a url with urlfetch.fetch(url), it kept failing with:

[snip]
  File "/home/channam/Code/python/google_appengine/google/appengine/api/urlfetch.py", line 241, in fetch
    return rpc.get_result(allow_truncated)
  File "/home/channam/Code/python/google_appengine/google/appengine/api/urlfetch.py", line 388, in get_result
    self.check_success(allow_truncated)
  File "/home/channam/Code/python/google_appengine/google/appengine/api/urlfetch.py", line 356, in check_success
    raise DownloadError(str(e))
DownloadError: ApplicationError: 2

A little bit of poking found that the issue was caused by having a space in the url, something which I’m fairly certain was ok on early versions of GAE. Oh well you live and learn.