urllib2 - Fetch a Wikipedia article with Python

Question

I try to fetch a Wikipedia article with Python's urllib:

f = urllib.urlopen("http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Albert_Einstein&printable=yes")           
s = f.read()
f.close()

However instead of the html page I get the following response: Error - Wikimedia Foundation:

Request: GET http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Albert_Einstein&printable=yes, from 192.35.17.11 via knsq1.knams.wikimedia.org (squid/2.6.STABLE21) to ()
Error: ERR_ACCESS_DENIED, errno [No Error] at Tue, 23 Sep 2008 09:09:08 GMT 

Wikipedia seems to block request which are not from a standard browser.

Anybody know how to work around this?

Answer 1

You need to use the urllib2 that superseedes urllib in the python std library in order to change the user agent.

Straight from the examples

import urllib2
opener = urllib2.build_opener()
opener.addheaders = [('User-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0')]
infile = opener.open('http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Albert_Einstein&printable=yes')
page = infile.read()