How to avoid HTTP error 429 (Too Many Requests) python

Question

I am trying to use Python to login to a website and gather information from several webpages and I get the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "extract_test.py", line 43, in <module>
    response=br.open(v)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/mechanize/_mechanize.py", line 203, in open
    return self._mech_open(url, data, timeout=timeout)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/mechanize/_mechanize.py", line 255, in _mech_open
    raise response
mechanize._response.httperror_seek_wrapper: HTTP Error 429: Unknown Response Code

I used time.sleep() and it works, but it seems unintelligent and unreliable, is there any other way to dodge this error?

Here's my code:

import mechanize
import cookielib
import re
first=("example.com/page1")
second=("example.com/page2")
third=("example.com/page3")
fourth=("example.com/page4")
## I have seven URL's I want to open

urls_list=[first,second,third,fourth]

br = mechanize.Browser()
# Cookie Jar
cj = cookielib.LWPCookieJar()
br.set_cookiejar(cj)

# Browser options 
br.set_handle_equiv(True)
br.set_handle_redirect(True)
br.set_handle_referer(True)
br.set_handle_robots(False)

# Log in credentials
br.open("example.com")
br.select_form(nr=0)
br["username"] = "username"
br["password"] = "password"
br.submit()

for url in urls_list:
        br.open(url)
        print re.findall("Some String")

Answer 1

Receiving a status 429 is not an error, it is the other server "kindly" asking you to please stop spamming requests. Obviously, your rate of requests has been too high and the server is not willing to accept this.

You should not seek to "dodge" this, or even try to circumvent server security settings by trying to spoof your IP, you should simply respect the server's answer by not sending too many requests.

If everything is set up properly, you will also have received a "Retry-after" header along with the 429 response. This header specifies the number of seconds you should wait before making another call. The proper way to deal with this "problem" is to read this header and to sleep your process for that many seconds.

You can find more information on status 429 here: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6585#page-3