Fetch a Wikipedia article with Python

http-status-code-403, python, urllib2, user-agent, wikipedia

Solution

You need to use the urllib2 that superseedes urllib in the python std library in order to change the user agent.

Straight from the examples

import urllib2
opener = urllib2.build_opener()
opener.addheaders = [('User-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0')]
infile = opener.open('http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Albert_Einstein&printable=yes')
page = infile.read()

Problem

I try to fetch a Wikipedia article with Python's urllib: ``` f = urllib.urlopen("http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Albert_Einstein&printable=yes") s = f.read() f.close() ``` However instead of the html page I get the following response: Error - Wikimedia Foundation: ``` Request: GET http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Albert_Einstein&printable=yes, from 192.35.17.11 via knsq1.knams.wikimedia.org (squid/2.6.STABLE21) to () Error: ERR_ACCESS_DENIED, errno [No Error] at Tue, 23 Sep 2008 09:09:08 GMT ``` Wikipedia seems to block request which are not from a standard browser. Anybody know how to work around this?

Original source