Question

I’m writing a script, and it requires to get a reCAPTCHA challenge with a specified public key, so I though if I opened this with urllib2:

chp = urllib.urlencode(dict({'k': key}))
chg = urllib2.urlopen('http://www.google.com/recaptcha/api/challenge', chp).read()

I could then get the challenge from there and return it, but when it does this I get the error:

urllib2.HTTPError: HTTP Error 405: HTTP method POST is not supported by this URL

How can I solve this?

Answer 1

Use a GET request instead:

chp = urllib.urlencode(dict({'k': key}))
chg = urllib2.urlopen('http://www.google.com/recaptcha/api/challenge?' + chp).read()

As the urllib2 documentation states:

data may be a string specifying additional data to send to the server, or None if no such data is needed. Currently HTTP requests are the only ones that use data; the HTTP request will be a POST instead of a GET when the data parameter is provided.

You were passing in chp as POST data by passing it to the urlopen method as the second positional argument. Concatenating it to the URL with a ? instead makes it a GET request.