The URL is "https://sb-content.pa.caesarsonline.com/content-service/api/v1/q/time-band-event-list?".
I think it uses Cloudflare which is why I am having difficulty but I am not sure if that is the only issue. I don't necessarily need a solution shown in Scrapy, I have played around with cfscrape and can't get it to get any response other than 403 as well.
You are correct in assuming that this is cloudflare blocking automated requests.
<title>Access denied | sb-content.pa.caesarsonline.com used Cloudflare to restrict access</title>
You can use the library "cloudscraper" to try and bypass this but as cloudflare changes their detection methods periodically you might eventually have troubles until the library is updated.
Cloud Scraper Library: https://pypi.org/project/cloudscraper/
Example:
import cloudscraper
scraper = cloudscraper.create_scraper()
response = scraper.get("https://sb-content.pa.caesarsonline.com/content-service/api/v1/q/time-band-event-list?").text
print(response)
Output:
{"data":{"timeBandEvents":[{"type":"LIVE","date":null,"competitionSummary":[],"events":[],"outrights":[]},{"type":"NEXT_TO_GO"........
I am coding a web scraper for the website with the following Python code:
import requests
def scrape(url):
req = requests.get(url)
with open('out.html', 'w') as f:
f.write(req.text)
It works a few times but then an error HTML page is returned by the website (when I open my browser, I have a captcha to complete).
Is there a way to avoid this “ban” by for example changing the IP address?
As already mentioned in the comments and from yourself, changing the IP could help. To do this quite easily have a look at vpngate.py:
https://gist.github.com/Lazza/bbc15561b65c16db8ca8
An How to is provided at the link.
You can use a proxy with the requests library. You can find some free proxies at a couple different websites like https://www.sslproxies.org/ and http://free-proxy.cz/en/proxylist/country/US/https/uptime/level3 but not all of them work and they should not be trusted with sensitive information.
example:
proxy = {
"https": 'https://158.177.252.170:3128',
"http": 'https://158.177.252.170:3128'
}
response=requests.get('https://httpbin.org/ip', proxies=proxy)
I recently answered this on another question here, but using the requests-ip-rotator library to rotate IPs through API gateway is usually the most effective way.
It's free for the first million requests per region, and it means you won't have to give your data to unreliable proxy sites.
Late answer, I found this looking for IP-spoofing, but to the OP's question - as some comments point out, you may or may not actually be getting banned. Here's two things to consider:
A soft ban: they don't like bots. Simple solution that's worked for me in the past is to add headers, so they think you're a browser, e.g.,
req = requests.get(url, headers={'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0'})
On-page active elements, scripts or popups that act as content gates, not a ban per se - e.g., country/language selector, cookie config, surveys, etc. requiring user input. Not-as-simple solution: use a webdriver like Selenium + chromedriver to render the page including JS and then add "user" clicks to deal with the problems.
I recently wanted to extract data from a website that seems to use cookies to grant me access. I do not know very much about those procedures but appearently this inteferes with my method of getting the html content of the website via Python and its requests module.
The code I am running to extract the information contains the following lines:
import responses
#...
response = requests.get(url, proxies=proxies)
content = requests.text
Where the website i am referring to is http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/icp.jsp?arnumber=6675630&tag=1 and proxies is a valid dict of my proxy servers (I tested those settings on websites that seemed to work fine). However, instead of the content of the article on this site I receive the html-content of the page that you get when you do not accept cookies in your browser.
As I am not really aware of what website is really doing and lack real Web-Developement experience I could not find a solution so far, even if a similar question might have been asked before. Is there any solution to access the content of this website via Python?
startr = requests.get('https://viennaairport.com/login/')
secondr = requests.post('http://xxx/', cookies=startr.cookies)
I have been having problems with a script I am developing whereby I am receiving no output and the memory usage of the script is getting larger and larger over time. I have figured out the problem lies with some of the URLs I am checking with the Requests library. I am expecting to download a webpage however I download a large file instead. All this data is then stored in memory causing my issues.
What I want to know is; is there any way with the requests library to check what is being downloaded? With wget I can see: Length: 710330974 (677M) [application/zip].
Is this information available in the headers with requests? If so is there a way of terminating the download upon figuring out it is not a HTML webpage?
Thanks in advance.
Yes, the headers can tell you a lot about the page, most pages will include a Content-Length header.
By default, however, the request is downloaded in its entirety before the .get() or .post(), etc. call returns. Set the stream=True keyword to defer loading the response:
response = requests.get(url, stream=True)
Now you can inspect the headers and just discard the request if you don't like what you find:
length = int(response.headers.get('Content-Length', 0))
if length > 1048576:
print 'Response larger than 1MB, discarding
Subsequently accessing the .content or .text attributes, or the .json() method will trigger a full download of the response.
There's an FLV file on the web that can be downloaded directly in Chrome. The file is a television program, published by CCTV (China Central Television). CCTV is a non-profit, state-owned broadcaster, financed by the Chinese tax payer, which allows us to download their content without infringing copyrights.
Using wget, I can download the file from a different address, but not from the address that works in Chrome.
This is what I've tried to do:
url='http://114.80.235.200/f4v/94/163005294.h264_1.f4v?10000&key=7b9b1155dc632cbab92027511adcb300401443020d&playtype=1&tk=163659644989925531390490125&brt=2&bc=0&nt=0&du=1496650&ispid=23&rc=200&inf=1&si=11000&npc=1606&pp=0&ul=2&mt=-1&sid=10000&au=0&pc=0&cip=222.73.44.31&hf=0&id=tudou&itemid=135558267&fi=163005294&sz=59138302'
wget -c $url --user-agent="" -O xfgs.f4v
This doesn't work either:
wget -c $url -O xfgs.f4v
The output is:
Connecting to 118.26.57.12:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 403 Forbidden
2013-02-13 09:50:42 ERROR 403: Forbidden.
What am I doing wrong?
I ultimately want to download it with the Python library mechanize. Here is the code I'm using for that:
import mechanize
br = mechanize.Browser()
br = mechanize.Browser()
br.set_handle_robots(False)
br.set_handle_equiv(False)
br.addheaders = [('User-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008071615 Fedora/3.0.1-1.fc9 Firefox/3.0.1')]
url='http://114.80.235.200/f4v/94/163005294.h264_1.f4v?10000&key=7b9b1155dc632cbab92027511adcb300401443020d&playtype=1&tk=163659644989925531390490125&brt=2&bc=0&nt=0&du=1496650&ispid=23&rc=200&inf=1&si=11000&npc=1606&pp=0&ul=2&mt=-1&sid=10000&au=0&pc=0&cip=222.73.44.31&hf=0&id=tudou&itemid=135558267&fi=163005294&sz=59138302'
r = br.open(url).read()
tofile=open("/tmp/xfgs.f4v","w")
tofile.write(r)
tofile.close()
This is the result:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/mechanize/_mechanize.py", line 203, in open
return self._mech_open(url, data, timeout=timeout)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/mechanize/_mechanize.py", line 255, in _mech_open
raise response
mechanize._response.httperror_seek_wrapper: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden
Can anyone explain how to get the mechanize code to work please?
First of all, if you are attempting any kind of scraping (yes this counts as scraping even though you are not necessarily parsing HTML), you have a certain amount of preliminary investigation to perform.
If you don't already have Firefox and Firebug, get them. Then if you don't already have Chrome, get it.
Start up Firefox/Firebug, and Chrome, clear out all of your cookies/etc. Then open up Firebug, and in Chrome open up View->Developer->Developer Tools.
Then load up the main page of the video you are trying to grab. Take notice of any cookies/headers/POST variables/query string variables that are being set when the page loads. You may want to save this info somewhere.
Then try to download the video, once again, take notice of any cookies/headers/post variables/query string variables that are being set when the video is loaded. It is very likely that there was a cookie or POST variable set when you initially loaded the page, that is required to actually pull the video file.
When you write your python, you are going to need to emulate this interaction as closely as possible. Use python-requests. This is probably the simplest URL library available, and unless you run into a wall somehow with it (something it can't do), I would never use anything else. The second I started using python-requests, all of my URL fetching code shrunk by a factor of 5x.
Now, things are probably not going to work the first time you try them. Soooo, you will need to load the main page using python. Print out all of your cookies/headers/POST variables/query string variables, and compare them to what Chrome/Firebug had. Then try loading your video, once again, compare all of these values (that means what YOU sent the server, and what the SERVER sent you back as well). You will need to figure out what is different between them (don't worry, we ALL learned this one in Kindergarten... "one of these things is not like the other") and dissect how that difference is breaking stuff.
If at the end of all of this, you still can't figure it out, then you probably need to look at the HTML for the page that contains the link to the movie. Look for any javascript in the page. Then use Firebug/Chrome Developer Tools to inspect the javascript and see if it is doing some kind of management of your user session. If it is somehow generating tokens (cookies or POST/GET variables) related to video access, you will need to emulate its tokenizing method in python.
Hopefully all of this helps, and doesn't look too scary. The key is you are going to need to be a scientist. Figure out what you know, what you don't, what you want, and start experimenting and recording your results. Eventually a pattern will emerge.
Edit: Clarify steps
Investigate how state is being maintained
Pull initial page with python, grab any state info you need from it
Perform any tokenizing that may be required with that state info
Pull the video using the tokens from steps 2 and 3
If stuff blows up, output your request/response headers,cookies,query vars, post vars, and compare them to Chrome/Firebug
Return to step 1. until you find a solution
Edit:
You may also be getting redirected at either one of these requests (the html page or the file download). You will most likely miss the request/response in Firebug/Chrome if that is happening. The solution would be to use a sniffer like LiveHTTPHeaders, or like has been suggested by other responders, WireShark or Fiddler. Note that Fiddler will do you no good if you are on a Linux or OSX box. It is Windows only and is definitely focused on .NET development... (ugh). Wireshark is very useful but overkill for most problems, and depending on what machine you are running, you may have problems getting it working. So I would suggest LiveHTTPHeaders first.
I love this kind of problem
It seems that mechanize can do stateful browsing, meaning that it will keep context and cookies between browser requests. I would suggest to first load the complete page where the video is located, then do a second try to download the video explicitly. That way, the web server will think that it is a full (legit) browsing session ongoing
you can use selenium or watir to do all the stuff you need in a browser.
since you don't want to see the browser, you can run selenium headless.
see also this answer.
Assuming that you did not type the URL out of the blue by hand, use mechanize to first go to the page where you got that from. Then emulate the action you take to download the actual file (probably clicking a link or a button).
This might not work though as Mechanize keeps state of cookies and redirects, but does not handle any JavaScript real-time changes to the html pages. To check if JavaScript is crucial for the operation, switch of JavaScript in Chrome (or any other browser) and make sure you can download the file. If JavaScript is necessary, I would try and programmatically drive a browser to get the file.
My usual approach to trying this kind of scraping is
try wget or pythons urllib2
try mechanize
drive a browser
Unless there is some captcha, the last one usually works, but the others are easier (and faster).
In order to clarify the "why" part of your question you can route your browser and your code's requests through a debug proxy. If you are using windows I suggest fiddler2. There exist other debug proxies for other platforms as well. But fiddler2 is definitely my favourite.
http://www.fiddler2.com/fiddler2/
https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_WebScarab_Project
http://www.charlesproxy.com/
Or more low level
http://netcat.sourceforge.net/
http://www.wireshark.org/
Once you know the differences it is usually much simpler to come up with a solution. I suspect that the other answers with regard to stateful browsing / cookies are correct. With the mentioned tools you can analyze these cookies and roll a suitable solution without going for browser automation.
I think many sites use temporary links that only exist in your session. The code in the url is probably something like your session-id. That means the particular link will never work again.
You'll have to reopen the page that contains the link using some library that accomodates this session (like mentioned in other answers). And then try to locate the link and only use it in this session.
While the current accepted answer (by G. Shearer) is the best possible advice for scraping in general, I've found a way to skip a few steps - with a firefox extension called cliget that takes the request context with all the http headers and cookies and generates a curl (or wget) command that is copied to the clipboard.
EDIT: this feature is also available in the network panels of firebug and the chrome debugger - right click request, "copy as curl"
Most of the time you'll get a very verbose command with a few apparently unneeded headers, but you can remove those one by one until the server rejects the request, instead of the opposite (which, honestly, I find frustrating - I often got stuck thinking what header was missing from the request).
(Also, you might want to remove the -O option from the curl commandline to see the result in stdout instead of downloading it to a file, and add -v to see the full header list)
Even if you don't want to use curl/wget, converting one curl/wget commandline to python code is just a matter of knowing how to add headers to an urllib request (or any http request library for that matter)
There's an open source, Python library, named ghost, that wraps a headless, WebKit browser, so you can control everything through a simple API:
from ghost import Ghost
ghost = Ghost()
page, resources = ghost.open('http://my.web.page')
It supports cookies, JavaScript and everything else. You can inject JavaScript into the page, and while it's headless, so it doesn't render anything graphically, you still have the DOM. It's a complete browser.
It wouldn't scale well, but it's lots of fun, and may be useful when you need something approaching a complete browser.
from urllib import urlopen
print urlopen(url) #python built-in high level interface to get ANY online resources, auto responds to HTTP error codes.
Did you try requests module? it's much simpler to use than urllib2 and pycurl etc.
yet it's powerful. it has following features: The link is here
International Domains and URLs
Keep-Alive & Connection Pooling
Sessions with Cookie Persistence
Browser-style SSL Verification
Basic/Digest Authentication
Elegant Key/Value Cookies
Automatic Decompression
Unicode Response Bodies
Multipart File Uploads
Connection Timeouts
.netrc support
Python 2.6—3.3
Thread-safe.
You could use Internet Download Manager it is able to capture and download any streaming media from any website