XHR request URL says does not exist when attempting to parse it's content

Question

Before I build a full solution to my problem using Scrapy I am posting a simplistic version of what I want to do:

import requests

url = 'http://www.whoscored.com/stageplayerstatfeed/?field=1&isAscending=false&orderBy=Rating&playerId=-1&stageId=9155&teamId=32"'

params = {'d': date.strftime('%Y%m'), 'isAggregate': 'false'}
headers = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/36.0.1985.125 Safari/537.36'}

response = requests.get(url, params=params, headers=headers)

fixtures = response.body
#fixtures = literal_eval(response.content)
print fixtures 

This code is saying that the above URL does not exist. The URL relates to an XHR request that is submitted when you toggle from the 'Overall' to the 'Home' tab of the main table on this page:

http://www.whoscored.com/Teams/32/

If you activate XHR logging within the Console of Google Developer Tools you can see both the XHR request and the response sent from the server in the form of a dictionary (which is the expected format).

Can anyone tell me why the above code is not returning the data I would expect to see?

Thanks

Answer 1

You have several problems:

• the url should be http://www.whoscored.com/stageplayerstatfeed
• wrong GET parameters
• missing important required headers
• you need response.json(), not response.body

The fixed version:

import requests

url = 'http://www.whoscored.com/stageplayerstatfeed'
params = {
    'field': '1',
    'isAscending': 'false',
    'orderBy': 'Rating',
    'playerId': '-1',
    'stageId': '9155',
    'teamId': '32'
}
headers = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/36.0.1985.125 Safari/537.36',
           'X-Requested-With': 'XMLHttpRequest',
           'Host': 'www.whoscored.com',
           'Referer': 'http://www.whoscored.com/Teams/32/'}

response = requests.get(url, params=params, headers=headers)

fixtures = response.json()
print fixtures

Prints:

[
    {
        u'AccurateCrosses': 0,
        u'AccurateLongBalls': 10,
        u'AccuratePasses': 89,
        u'AccurateThroughBalls': 0,
        u'AerialLost': 2,
        u'AerialWon': 4,
        ...
    },
    ...
]