urllib2 - 403 that _should_ not occur.

[James Mills]

On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 12:58 PM, Philip Semanchuk <philip at semanchuk.com> wrote:
>
> On Jan 11, 2009, at 8:59 PM, James Mills wrote:
>
>> Hey all,
>>
>> The following fails for me:
>>
>>>>> from urllib2 import urlopen
>>>>> f =
>>>>> urlopen("http://groups.google.com/group/chromium-announce/feed/rss_v2_0_msgs.xml")
>>
>> Traceback (most recent call last):
>>  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
>>  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/urllib2.py", line 124, in urlopen
>>   return _opener.open(url, data, timeout)
>>  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/urllib2.py", line 389, in open
>>   response = meth(req, response)
>>  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/urllib2.py", line 502, in http_response
>>   'http', request, response, code, msg, hdrs)
>>  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/urllib2.py", line 427, in error
>>   return self._call_chain(*args)
>>  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/urllib2.py", line 361, in _call_chain
>>   result = func(*args)
>>  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/urllib2.py", line 510, in http_error_default
>>   raise HTTPError(req.get_full_url(), code, msg, hdrs, fp)
>> urllib2.HTTPError: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden
>>>>>
>>
>> However, that _same_ url works perfectly fine on the
>> same machine (and same network) using any of:
>> * curl
>> * wget
>> * elinks
>> * firefox
>>
>> Any helpful ideas ?
>
> The remote server doesn't like your user agent?
>
> It'd be easier to help if you post a working sample.

That was a working sample! The "User-Agent" didn't
occur to me :) Thanks - I think that might be it.

Why Google would deny access to services by
unknown User Agents is beyond me - especially
since in most cases User Agents strings are not
strict.

cheers
James