Changing user agent on urllib2.urlopen

Question

How can I download a webpage with a user agent other than the default one on urllib2.urlopen?

Answer 1

For urllib you can use:

from urllib import FancyURLopener

class MyOpener(FancyURLopener, object):
    version = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; it; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11'

myopener = MyOpener()
myopener.retrieve('https://www.google.com/search?q=test', 'useragent.html')

Answer 2

Another solution in urllib2 and Python 2.7:

req = urllib2.Request('http://www.example.com/')
req.add_unredirected_header('User-Agent', 'Custom User-Agent')
urllib2.urlopen(req)

Answer 3

Setting the User-Agent from everyone's favorite Dive Into Python.

The short story: You can use Request.add_header to do this.

You can also pass the headers as a dictionary when creating the Request itself, as the docs note:

headers should be a dictionary, and will be treated as if add_header() was called with each key and value as arguments. This is often used to “spoof” the User-Agent header, which is used by a browser to identify itself – some HTTP servers only allow requests coming from common browsers as opposed to scripts. For example, Mozilla Firefox may identify itself as "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11", while urllib2‘s default user agent string is "Python-urllib/2.6" (on Python 2.6).