Python urllib urlopen not working

import requests
import urllib

link = "http://www.somesite.com/details.pl?urn=2344"

f = urllib.request.urlopen(link)
myfile = f.read()

writeFileObj = open('output.xml', 'wb')
writeFileObj.write(myfile)
writeFileObj.close()

You are reading the wrong documentation or the wrong Python interpreter version. You tried to use the Python 3 library in Python 2.

Use:

import urllib2

sock = urllib2.urlopen("http://diveintopython.org/") 
htmlSource = sock.read()                            
sock.close()                                        
print htmlSource

The Python 2 urllib2 library was replaced by urllib.request in Python 3.