urlopen got multiple values error

Problem

I tried to run a Python script given by a friend. It ended with this error:

  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/urllib3/request.py", line 79, in request
    **urlopen_kw)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/urllib3/request.py", line 142, in request_encode_body
    **urlopen_kw)
TypeError: urlopen() got multiple values for keyword argument 'body'

Solution

The script used a Python package, which in turn used urllib3. This strange error has nothing to do with my code, but with the urllib3 package. The urllib3 package installed by Ubuntu was pretty old: 1.7.1. Updating to a more recent version of the package will fix the error. Either upgrade using sudo pip install urllib3 for system-wide update or update inside your virtualenv.