How do you change connection settings like timeouts in Mechanize?

In Mechanize, an automation library for Python, you can change the connection settings, including timeouts, by accessing the properties of the Browser object. The Browser object has a method called set_timeout that can be used to set the timeout for HTTP requests.

Here's an example of how to set the timeout in Mechanize:

import mechanize

# Create a Browser instance
br = mechanize.Browser()

# Set the timeout (in seconds)
br.set_timeout(10)

The set_timeout function sets the timeout for HTTP and HTTPS requests. This timeout value is used for the connection to the server, and sometimes you might want to set it to avoid your script hanging indefinitely if the server is not responding.

If you want to have more granular control over different types of timeouts, you can access the underlying HTTP handler of the Mechanize Browser instance. Here's how you can do it:

import mechanize

# Create a Browser instance
br = mechanize.Browser()

# Set timeout for socket connections
br.set_handle_timeout(10)

# Alternatively, set timeouts at a lower level
for handler in br.handlers:
    if isinstance(handler, mechanize._http.HTTPHandler):
        handler.set_http_debuglevel(1)
        handler._timeout = 10  # Set the timeout (in seconds)

# Now you can open a page with the timeout
try:
    response = br.open('http://example.com')
except Exception as e:
    print(f"An error occurred: {e}")

In the above code, we iterate through the handlers of the Browser object to find the HTTPHandler and set its timeout.

Please note that when dealing with timeouts, you should also be prepared to handle exceptions, as setting a timeout might lead to a urllib2.URLError or a similar exception if the timeout is exceeded.

Keep in mind that the mechanize library is mostly used for Python 2, and if you're working with Python 3, you might want to consider using MechanicalSoup or requests with BeautifulSoup as alternatives for web scraping tasks.