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).
There is example code in that question, but basically you can do something like this: (Note the capitalization of User-Agent as of RFC 2616, section 14.43.)
All these should work in theory, but (with Python 2.7.2 on Windows at least) any time you send a custom User-agent header, urllib2 doesn't send that header. If you don't try to send a User-agent header, it sends the default Python / urllib2
None of these methods seem to work for adding User-agent but they work for other headers:
opener = urllib2.build_opener(proxy)
opener.addheaders = {'User-agent':'Custom user agent'}
urllib2.install_opener(opener)
request = urllib2.Request(url, headers={'User-agent':'Custom user agent'})
request.headers['User-agent'] = 'Custom user agent'
request.add_header('User-agent', 'Custom user agent')
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')
there are two properties of urllib.URLopener() namely: addheaders = [('User-Agent', 'Python-urllib/1.17'), ('Accept', '*/*')] and version = 'Python-urllib/1.17'.
To fool the website you need to changes both of these values to an accepted User-Agent. for e.g.
Chrome browser : 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/33.0.1750.149 Safari/537.36'
Google bot : 'Googlebot/2.1'
like this