Question

I have completed a program that is outlined in chapter 3 of Head First Programming.
Basically, the program searches a website and stores the price on that page. Then depending on which option the user selects, a certain message will be sent to the user’s twitter account.

Source code from book’s website: http://headfirstlabs.com/books/hfprog/chapter03/page108.py

When I run my program, and run the source code from the book’s website, I get the same error.

Here is the error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Users\Krysten\Desktop\Ch3.py", line 28, in <module>
    send_to_twitter(get_price())
  File "C:\Users\Krysten\Desktop\Ch3.py", line 14, in send_to_twitter
    resp = urllib.request.urlopen("http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json", params)
  File "C:\Python31\lib\urllib\request.py", line 121, in urlopen
    return _opener.open(url, data, timeout)
  File "C:\Python31\lib\urllib\request.py", line 356, in open
    response = meth(req, response)
  File "C:\Python31\lib\urllib\request.py", line 468, in http_response
    'http', request, response, code, msg, hdrs)
  File "C:\Python31\lib\urllib\request.py", line 394, in error
    return self._call_chain(*args)
  File "C:\Python31\lib\urllib\request.py", line 328, in _call_chain
    result = func(*args)
  File "C:\Python31\lib\urllib\request.py", line 476, in http_error_default
    raise HTTPError(req.full_url, code, msg, hdrs, fp)
urllib.error.HTTPError: HTTP Error 401: Unauthorized

Is the error being caused because the book is somewhat outdated and twitter has to be accessed in a different way?

Answer 1

In most of Twitter API, basic authentication is deprecated. Use OAuth API.