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pythonpython-requestshttp-status-code-403

How to fix "403 Forbidden" errors when calling APIs using Python requests?

I needed to parse a site, but I got a 403 Forbidden error.

Here is the code:

url = 'http://worldagnetwork.com/'
result = requests.get(url)
print(result.content.decode())

The output is:

<html>
<head><title>403 Forbidden</title></head>
<body bgcolor="white">
<center><h1>403 Forbidden</h1></center>
<hr><center>nginx</center>
</body>
</html>

What is the problem?

Solution

  • It seems the page rejects GET requests that do not identify a User-Agent. I visited the page with a browser (Chrome) and copied the User-Agent header of the GET request (look in the Network tab of the developer tools):

    import requests
url = 'http://worldagnetwork.com/'
headers = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/50.0.2661.102 Safari/537.36'}
result = requests.get(url, headers=headers)
print(result.content.decode())

# <!doctype html>
# <!--[if lt IE 7 ]><html class="no-js ie ie6" lang="en"> <![endif]-->
# <!--[if IE 7 ]><html class="no-js ie ie7" lang="en"> <![endif]-->
# <!--[if IE 8 ]><html class="no-js ie ie8" lang="en"> <![endif]-->
# <!--[if (gte IE 9)|!(IE)]><!--><html class="no-js" lang="en"> <!--<![endif]-->
# ...