Why am I getting this error in python ? (httplib)

From the documentation for httplib (Python 2) (called http.client in Python 3):

exception httplib.BadStatusLine: (exception http.client.BadStatusLine:)

A subclass of HTTPException.

Raised if a server responds with an HTTP status code that we don’t understand.

I ran the same code and did not receive an error:

>>> theurl = 'http://www.garageband.com/mp3cat/.UZCKbS6N4qk/01_Saraenglish.mp3'
>>> if theurl.startswith("http://"):
...     theurl = theurl[7:]
...     head = theurl[:theurl.find('/')]
...     tail = theurl[theurl.find('/'):]
... 
>>> head
'www.garageband.com'
>>> tail
'/mp3cat/.UZCKbS6N4qk/01_Saraenglish.mp3'
>>> response_code = 0
>>> import httplib
>>> conn = httplib.HTTPConnection(head)
>>> conn.request("HEAD", tail)
>>> res = conn.getresponse()
>>> res.status
302
>>> response_code = int(res.status)

I guess just double-check everything and try again?

I recently got this error, in a situation where the method that contained the http request ran successfully once, and then threw this exception (with the status code as an empty string) the second time the method was called (with a different URL). I had a debugging advantage because this is calling my own REST api, so I did some logging on the server side and discovered that the request was never being received. I ultimately figured out that my URL string had a trailing newline character. So make sure that your URLs are stripped of any leading or trailing special characters.