Question

Hello Guys! I want to access some web page through python script. The url is: http://www.idealo.de/preisvergleich/Shop/27039.html

When I access it through web browser it is OK. But when I want to access it with urllib2:

a = urllib2.urlopen("http://www.idealo.de/preisvergleich/Shop/27039.html")

It gives me the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 126, in urlopen
    return _opener.open(url, data, timeout)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 406, in open
    response = meth(req, response)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 519, in http_response
    'http', request, response, code, msg, hdrs)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 444, in error
    return self._call_chain(*args)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 378, in _call_chain
    result = func(*args)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 527, in http_error_default
    raise HTTPError(req.get_full_url(), code, msg, hdrs, fp)
urllib2.HTTPError: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden

Also I tried to access it with wget:

wget http://www.idealo.de/preisvergleich/Shop/27039.html

The error is:

--2012-04-23 12:42:03--  http://www.idealo.de/preisvergleich/Shop/27039.html
Resolving www.idealo.de (www.idealo.de)... 62.146.49.133
Connecting to www.idealo.de (www.idealo.de)|62.146.49.133|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 403 Forbidden
2012-04-23 12:42:03 ERROR 403: Forbidden.

Can anyone explain why it is so? And how can I access it using python?

Answer 1

They’re blocking some user agents. If you try with the following:

wget -U "Mozilla/5.0" http://www.idealo.de/preisvergleich/Shop/27039.html

it works. So you have to find the way to fake the user agent in your python code to make it work.

Try this:

import urllib2
opener = urllib2.build_opener()
opener.addheaders = [('User-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0')]
a = opener.open("http://www.idealo.de/preisvergleich/Shop/27039.html")