HTTP Basic Authentication not working with Python 3

Question

I am trying to access an intranet site with HTTP Basic Authentication enabled.

Here's the code I'm using:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import urllib.request, base64, urllib.error

request = urllib.request.Request(url)
string = '%s:%s' % ('username','password')

base64string = base64.standard_b64encode(string.encode('utf-8'))

request.add_header("Authorization", "Basic %s" % base64string)
try:
    u = urllib.request.urlopen(request)
except urllib.error.HTTPError as e:
    print(e)
    print(e.headers)

soup = BeautifulSoup(u.read(), 'html.parser')

print(soup.prettify())

But it doesn't work and fails with 401 Authorization required. I can't figure out why it's not working.

Answer 1

The solution given here works without any modifications.

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import urllib.request

# create a password manager
password_mgr = urllib.request.HTTPPasswordMgrWithDefaultRealm()

# Add the username and password.
# If we knew the realm, we could use it instead of None.
top_level_url = "http://example.com/foo/"
password_mgr.add_password(None, top_level_url, username, password)

handler = urllib.request.HTTPBasicAuthHandler(password_mgr)

# create "opener" (OpenerDirector instance)
opener = urllib.request.build_opener(handler)

# use the opener to fetch a URL
u = opener.open(url)

soup = BeautifulSoup(u.read(), 'html.parser')

The previous code works as well. You just have to decode the utf-8 encoded string otherwise the header contains a byte-sequence.

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import urllib.request, base64, urllib.error

request = urllib.request.Request(url)
string = '%s:%s' % ('username','password')

base64string = base64.standard_b64encode(string.encode('utf-8'))

request.add_header("Authorization", "Basic %s" % base64string.decode('utf-8'))
try:
    u = urllib.request.urlopen(request)
except urllib.error.HTTPError as e:
    print(e)
    print(e.headers)

soup = BeautifulSoup(u.read(), 'html.parser')

print(soup.prettify())