HTTPError: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden

Question

I making a python script for personal use but it's not working for wikipedia...

This work:

import urllib2, sys
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

site = "http://youtube.com"
page = urllib2.urlopen(site)
soup = BeautifulSoup(page)
print soup

This not work:

import urllib2, sys
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

site= "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StackOverflow"
page = urllib2.urlopen(site)
soup = BeautifulSoup(page)
print soup

This is the error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Python27\wiki.py", line 5, in <module>
    page = urllib2.urlopen(site)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\urllib2.py", line 126, in urlopen
    return _opener.open(url, data, timeout)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\urllib2.py", line 406, in open
    response = meth(req, response)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\urllib2.py", line 519, in http_response
    'http', request, response, code, msg, hdrs)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\urllib2.py", line 444, in error
    return self._call_chain(*args)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\urllib2.py", line 378, in _call_chain
    result = func(*args)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\urllib2.py", line 527, in http_error_default
    raise HTTPError(req.get_full_url(), code, msg, hdrs, fp)
HTTPError: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden

Answer 1

Within the current code:

Python 2.X

import urllib2, sys
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

site= "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StackOverflow"
hdr = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0'}
req = urllib2.Request(site,headers=hdr)
page = urllib2.urlopen(req)
soup = BeautifulSoup(page)
print soup

Python 3.X

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from urllib.request import Request, urlopen

site= "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StackOverflow"
hdr = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0'}
req = Request(site,headers=hdr)
page = urlopen(req)
soup = BeautifulSoup(page)
print(soup)

Python 3.X with Selenium (Javascript functions execution)

from selenium import webdriver as driver

browser = driver.PhantomJS()
p = browser.get("http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StackOverflow")
assert "Stack Overflow - Wikipedia" in browser.title

The reason modified version works is because Wikipedia checks for User-Agent to be of "popular browser"