requests.get returns 403 while the same url works in browser

Question

I'm trying to use the search form at rlsnet.ru. Here is the form's definition I've extracted from the source file:

<form id="site_search_form" action="/search_result.htm" method="get">
    <input id="simplesearch_text_input" class="search__field" type="text" name="word" value="" autocomplete="off">
    <input type="hidden" name="path" value="/" id="path">
    <input type="hidden" name="enter_clicked" value="1">
    <input id="letters_id" type="hidden" name="letters" value="">
    <input type="submit" class="g-btn search__btn" value="Найти" id="simplesearch_button">
    <div class="sf_suggestion">
        <ul style="display: none; z-index:1000; opacity:0.85;">
        </ul>
    </div>
    <div id="contentsf">
    </div>
</form>

Here is the code I used to send the search request:

import requests
from urllib.parse import urlencode 

root = "http://www.rlsnet.ru/search_result.htm?"
response = requests.get(root + urlencode({"word": "Церебролизин".encode('cp1251')})

Each time I do it, the response status is 403. When I enter the same request URL (i.e. http://www.rlsnet.ru/search_result.htm?word=%D6%E5%F0%E5%E1%F0%EE%EB%E8%E7%E8%ED) into Safari/Chrome/Opera, it works fine and returns the expected page. What am I doing wrong? Googling the issue only brought this SO question: why url works in browser but not using requests get method, which was of little use.

Answer 1

Well that's because default User-Agent of requests is python-requests/2.13.0, and in your case that website don't like traffic from "non-browsers", so they try to block such traffic.

>>> import requests
>>> session = requests.Session()
>>> session.headers
{'Connection': 'keep-alive', 'Accept-Encoding': 'gzip, deflate', 'Accept': '*/*', 'User-Agent': 'python-requests/2.13.0'}

All you need to do is to make the request appear like coming from a browser, so just add an extra header parameter:

import requests

headers = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/56.0.2924.76 Safari/537.36'} # This is chrome, you can set whatever browser you like
response = requests.get('http://www.rlsnet.ru/search_result.htm?word=%D6%E5%F0%E5%E1%F0%EE%EB%E8%E7%E8%ED', headers=headers)

print response.status_code
print response.url

200 
http://www.rlsnet.ru/search_result.htm?word=%D6%E5%F0%E5%E1%F0%EE%EB%E8%E7%E8%ED