Never Hang: Timeouts and Fallbacks

Medium ⏱ 12 min 53% acceptance ★★★★★ 4.6

A request without a timeout can hang forever. Write fetch_with_timeout(url, seconds, fallback) passing timeout=seconds and returning fallback if requests.exceptions.Timeout (or any RequestException) fires — production callers always get an answer.

Examples

Example 1

Input

fetch_with_timeout(slow_url, 2, {})

Output

{} when the server exceeds 2 s

Explanation

The timeout exception became a fallback value.

Constraints

Pass timeout explicitly.
Catch requests.exceptions.RequestException.

Topics

APIstimeout

Companies

NetflixUberSwiggy

Hints

Hint 1

Timeout subclasses RequestException.

Hint 2

Return response.json() on the happy path.

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