http.client request method in Python 3 - python-3.x

Question

When I run this code:
import http.client
hR = ["/index.html"]
conn = http.client.HTTPConnection("www.python.org", 80)
conn.connect()
conn.request("GET", hR)
response = conn.getresponse()
data = response.read()
print (data)
conn.close()
I receive the following error:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "C:\Python32\files\fcon.py", line 5, in <module>
conn.request("GET", hR)
File "C:\Python32\lib\http\client.py", line 964, in request
self._send_request(method, url, body, headers)
File "C:\Python32\lib\http\client.py", line 992, in _send_request
self.putrequest(method, url, **skips)
File "C:\Python32\lib\http\client.py", line 877, in putrequest
if url.startswith('http'):
AttributeError: 'list' object has no attribute 'startswith'
Also, when I change the URL in line 3 to "http://python.org" I receive a different error:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "C:\Python32\files\fcon.py", line 4, in <module>
conn.connect()
File "C:\Python32\lib\http\client.py", line 721, in connect
self.timeout, self.source_address)
File "C:\Python32\lib\socket.py", line 380, in create_connection
for res in getaddrinfo(host, port, 0, SOCK_STREAM):
socket.gaierror: [Errno 11001] getaddrinfo failed

Answer 1

The first error message tells you that hR should not be a list, but a string, this would work:
import http.client
hR = "/index.html"
conn = http.client.HTTPConnection("www.python.org", 80)
conn.connect()
conn.request("GET", hR)
response = conn.getresponse()
data = response.read()
print (data)
conn.close()
However you won't see any data, because python.org replies only with a http 301 respons redirecting to it's https page, which http.client does not automatically follow.
The second error you get because http://www.python.org is not a valid host name, www.python.org was correct here.
http.client is a rather low-level API, you should consider using urllib.request instead, or even betther the requests library.