broken fetch in 2.18.3?

[Dave S]

In moving my application to 2.18.3 (windows exe kit, stable+timestamp.2019.03.03.23.22.30), I'm getting the following exception:

 File "applications\badlist\modules\restuff.py", line 51, in restuff
 bin=fetch(url)
 File "C:\Users\Dave\web2py_win\web2py_win.2-18-3\web2py\gluon\tools.py", line 4635, in fetch
 html = urlopen(req).read()
 File "urllib.py", line 87, in urlopen
 File "urllib.py", line 185, in open
 File "urllib.py", line 1066, in unwrap
 File "urllib2.py", line 256, in __getattr__
AttributeError: strip
<type 'exceptions.AttributeError'>(strip)

In 2.14.6, tools.py L4635 (which was L5226 back then) read as

html = urllib2.urlopen(req).read()
and in 2.18.3 this has been changed to (as shown above)|

 html = urlopen(req).read()

where urlopen is from pydal/_compat.py (in the if PY2 case)

 from urllib.request import FancyURLopener, urlopen

I suspect something is missing that's relevant to the change.   In my line 51, url is a string that's ultimately from a form field, and the fetch is for an image file (binary, hence stored in the cleverly named bin).

I'm not currently using fetch() on a linux system, and haven't install Python3 on Windows, so I haven't tried the PY3 environment.

/dps

(Off-topic:  the Google Groups post editor seems to be wanting to play with formatting my message in funny ways, including changing to "small" unpredictably.  I'm not sure I've overridden its choices.)