fix covid_stats_via_xpath.py

Improve error handling.

Author: lighting9999

web_programming/covid_stats_via_xpath.py

@@ -1,7 +1,6 @@
 """
-This is to show simple COVID19 info fetching from worldometers archive site using lxml
-* The main motivation to use lxml in place of bs4 is that it is faster and therefore
-more convenient to use in Python web projects (e.g. Django or Flask-based)
+This script demonstrates fetching simple COVID-19 statistics from the Worldometers archive site using lxml.
+lxml is chosen over BeautifulSoup for its speed and convenience in Python web projects (such as Django or Flask).
 """
 
 # /// script
@@ -12,28 +11,40 @@
 # ]
 # ///
 
-from typing import NamedTuple
 
+from typing import NamedTuple
 import httpx
 from lxml import html
 
-
 class CovidData(NamedTuple):
     cases: str
     deaths: str
     recovered: str
 
-
 def covid_stats(
     url: str = "https://web.archive.org/web/20250825095350/https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/",
 ) -> CovidData:
     xpath_str = '//div[@class = "maincounter-number"]/span/text()'
-    return CovidData(
-        *html.fromstring(httpx.get(url, timeout=10).content).xpath(xpath_str)
-    )
-
-
-fmt = """Total COVID-19 cases in the world: {}
+    try:
+        response = httpx.get(url, timeout=10)
+        response.raise_for_status()
+    except httpx.TimeoutException:
+        print("Request timed out. Please check your network connection or try again later.")
+        return CovidData("N/A", "N/A", "N/A")
+    except httpx.HTTPStatusError as e:
+        print(f"HTTP error occurred: {e}")
+        return CovidData("N/A", "N/A", "N/A")
+    except Exception as e:
+        print(f"An unexpected error occurred: {e}")
+        return CovidData("N/A", "N/A", "N/A")
+    data = html.fromstring(response.content).xpath(xpath_str)
+    if len(data) != 3:
+        print("Unexpected data format. The page structure may have changed.")
+        return CovidData("N/A", "N/A", "N/A")
+    return CovidData(*data)
+
+if __name__ == "__main__":
+    fmt = """Total COVID-19 cases in the world: {}
 Total deaths due to COVID-19 in the world: {}
 Total COVID-19 patients recovered in the world: {}"""
-print(fmt.format(*covid_stats()))
+    print(fmt.format(*covid_stats()))