urllib2.HTTPError: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden

Question

I am trying to automate download of historic stock data using python. The URL I am trying to open responds with a CSV file, but I am unable to open using urllib2. I have tried changing user agent as specified in few questions earlier, I even tried to accept response cookies, with no luck. Can you please help.

Note: The same method works for yahoo Finance.

Code:

import urllib2,cookielib

site= "http://www.nseindia.com/live_market/dynaContent/live_watch/get_quote/getHistoricalData.jsp?symbol=JPASSOCIAT&fromDate=1-JAN-2012&toDate=1-AUG-2012&datePeriod=unselected&hiddDwnld=true"

hdr = {'User-Agent':'Mozilla/5.0'}

req = urllib2.Request(site,headers=hdr)

page = urllib2.urlopen(req)

Error

File "C:\Python27\lib\urllib2.py", line 527, in http_error_default raise HTTPError(req.get_full_url(), code, msg, hdrs, fp) urllib2.HTTPError: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden

Thanks for your assistance

Answer 1

By adding a few more headers I was able to get the data:

import urllib2,cookielib

site= "http://www.nseindia.com/live_market/dynaContent/live_watch/get_quote/getHistoricalData.jsp?symbol=JPASSOCIAT&fromDate=1-JAN-2012&toDate=1-AUG-2012&datePeriod=unselected&hiddDwnld=true"
hdr = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/23.0.1271.64 Safari/537.11',
       'Accept': 'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8',
       'Accept-Charset': 'ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3',
       'Accept-Encoding': 'none',
       'Accept-Language': 'en-US,en;q=0.8',
       'Connection': 'keep-alive'}

req = urllib2.Request(site, headers=hdr)

try:
    page = urllib2.urlopen(req)
except urllib2.HTTPError, e:
    print e.fp.read()

content = page.read()
print content

Actually, it works with just this one additional header:

'Accept': 'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8',