Stopping python using ctrl+c

On Windows, the only sure way is to use CtrlBreak. Stops every python script instantly!

(Note that on some keyboards, "Break" is labeled as "Pause".)

Pressing Ctrl + c while a python program is running will cause python to raise a KeyboardInterrupt exception. It's likely that a program that makes lots of HTTP requests will have lots of exception handling code. If the except part of the try-except block doesn't specify which exceptions it should catch, it will catch all exceptions including the KeyboardInterrupt that you just caused. A properly coded python program will make use of the python exception hierarchy and only catch exceptions that are derived from Exception.

#This is the wrong way to do things
try:
  #Some stuff might raise an IO exception
except:
  #Code that ignores errors

#This is the right way to do things
try:
  #Some stuff might raise an IO exception
except Exception:
  #This won't catch KeyboardInterrupt

If you can't change the code (or need to kill the program so that your changes will take effect) then you can try pressing Ctrl + c rapidly. The first of the KeyboardInterrupt exceptions will knock your program out of the try block and hopefully one of the later KeyboardInterrupt exceptions will be raised when the program is outside of a try block.

If it is running in the Python shell use Ctrl + Z, otherwise locate the python process and kill it.

The interrupt process is hardware and OS dependent. So you will have very different behavior depending on where you run your python script. For example, on Windows machines we have Ctrl+C (SIGINT) and Ctrl+Break (SIGBREAK).

So while SIGINT is present on all systems and can be handled and caught, the SIGBREAK signal is Windows specific (and can be disabled in CONFIG.SYS) and is really handled by the BIOS as an interrupt vector INT 1Bh, which is why this key is much more powerful than any other. So if you're using some *nix flavored OS, you will get different results depending on the implementation, since that signal is not present there, but others are. In Linux you can check what signals are available to you by:

$ kill -l
 1) SIGHUP       2) SIGINT       3) SIGQUIT      4) SIGILL       5) SIGTRAP
 6) SIGABRT      7) SIGEMT       8) SIGFPE       9) SIGKILL     10) SIGBUS
11) SIGSEGV     12) SIGSYS      13) SIGPIPE     14) SIGALRM     15) SIGTERM
16) SIGURG      17) SIGSTOP     18) SIGTSTP     19) SIGCONT     20) SIGCHLD
21) SIGTTIN     22) SIGTTOU     23) SIGIO       24) SIGXCPU     25) SIGXFSZ
26) SIGVTALRM   27) SIGPROF     28) SIGWINCH    29) SIGPWR      30) SIGUSR1
31) SIGUSR2     32) SIGRTMAX

So if you want to catch the CTRL+BREAK signal on a linux system you'll have to check to what POSIX signal they have mapped that key. Popular mappings are:

CTRL+\     = SIGQUIT 
CTRL+D     = SIGQUIT
CTRL+C     = SIGINT
CTRL+Z     = SIGTSTOP 
CTRL+BREAK = SIGKILL or SIGTERM or SIGSTOP

In fact, many more functions are available under Linux, where the SysRq (System Request) key can take on a life of its own...