Fetch a Wikipedia article with Python

Question

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?

Answer 1

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() 

Answer 2

It is not a solution to the specific problem. But it might be intersting for you to use the mwclient library (http://botwiki.sno.cc/wiki/Python:Mwclient) instead. That would be so much easier. Especially since you will directly get the article contents which removes the need for you to parse the html.

I have used it myself for two projects, and it works very well.