download image from url using python urllib but receiving HTTP Error 403: Forbidden

Question

I want to download image file from a url using python module "urllib.request", which works for some website (e.g. mangastream.com), but does not work for another (mangadoom.co) receiving error "HTTP Error 403: Forbidden". What could be the problem for the latter case and how to fix it?

I am using python3.4 on OSX.

import urllib.request

# does not work
img_url = 'http://mangadoom.co/wp-content/manga/5170/886/005.png'
img_filename = 'my_img.png'
urllib.request.urlretrieve(img_url, img_filename)

At the end of error message it said:

... 
HTTPError: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden

However, it works for another website

# work
img_url = 'http://img.mangastream.com/cdn/manga/51/3140/006.png'
img_filename = 'my_img.png'
urllib.request.urlretrieve(img_url, img_filename)

I have tried the solutions from the post below, but none of them works on mangadoom.co.

Downloading a picture via urllib and python

How do I copy a remote image in python?

The solution here also does not fit because my case is to download image. urllib2.HTTPError: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden

Non-python solution is also welcome. Your suggestion will be very appreciated.

Answer 1

This website is blocking the user-agent used by urllib, so you need to change it in your request. Unfortunately I don't think urlretrieve supports this directly.

I advise for the use of the beautiful requests library, the code becomes (from here) :

import requests
import shutil

r = requests.get('http://mangadoom.co/wp-content/manga/5170/886/005.png', stream=True)
if r.status_code == 200:
    with open("img.png", 'wb') as f:
        r.raw.decode_content = True
        shutil.copyfileobj(r.raw, f)

Note that it seems this website does not forbide requests user-agent. But if need to be modified it is easy :

r = requests.get('http://mangadoom.co/wp-content/manga/5170/886/005.png',
                 stream=True, headers={'User-agent': 'Mozilla/5.0'})

Also relevant : changing user-agent in urllib

Answer 2

You can build an opener. Here's the example:

import urllib.request

opener=urllib.request.build_opener()
opener.addheaders=[('User-Agent','Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/36.0.1941.0 Safari/537.36')]
urllib.request.install_opener(opener)

url=''
local=''
urllib.request.urlretrieve(url,local)

By the way, the following codes are the same:

(none-opener)

req=urllib.request.Request(url,data,hdr)   
html=urllib.request.urlopen(req)

(opener builded)

html=operate.open(url,data,timeout)

However, we are not able to add header when we use:

urllib.request.urlretrieve()

So in this case, we have to build an opener.