Question

I’m trying to call the NYT events api with urllib2 but I’m receiving a 596 error. If I construct the url myself, there is no problem, but if I call urlopen with the data instead, I receive the 596 error. What’s going on? The 596 error seems to be undocumented, so it doesn’t help.

>>> data = urllib.urlencode({'api-key': os.environ['NYT_EVENT_LISTING_API_KEY']})  
>>> resp = urllib2.urlopen('?'.join([url,data]))
>>> resp = urllib2.urlopen(url, data)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<input>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 126, in urlopen
    return _opener.open(url, data, timeout)
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 400, in open
response = meth(req, response)
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 513, in http_response
'http', request, response, code, msg, hdrs)
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 438, in error
    return self._call_chain(*args)
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 372, in _call_chain
    result = func(*args)
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 521, in http_error_default
    raise HTTPError(req.get_full_url(), code, msg, hdrs, fp) 
HTTPError: HTTP Error 596: 

Answer 1

@Thomas is right, you are using GET in your first request which will construct the URL to something like this:

nytimes.com/api/?MY_API_KEY

However, your second call to urllib2.urlopen sends the data as a POST request to this URL

nytimes.com/api/

instead, which gives you 596 service not found error.

---

Now, urllib2 is notorious for its non-intuitive API and documentation, you may consider using Requests instead:

import requests

api_key = {'api-key': os.environ['NYT_EVENT_LISTING_API_KEY']}
resp = requests.get(url, params=api_key)
print resp.text
print resp.json

This way, GET requests and POST requests are a lot easier to distinguish, url and parameters are separated as well.