py3: don?t subscript socket.error On Python 2, socket.error was subscriptable. On Python 3, socket.error is an alias to OSError and is not subscriptable. The except block passes the exception to self.send_error(). This fails on both Python 2 (if it was executed) and Python 3, as it expects a string. Getting the attribute .strerror works on Python 2 and Python 3, and has the same effect as the previous code on Python 2.