urllib2.HTTPError: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden

This will work in Python 3

import urllib.request

user_agent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.7) Gecko/2009021910 Firefox/3.0.7'

url = "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_TCP_and_UDP_port_numbers"
headers={'User-Agent':user_agent,} 

request=urllib.request.Request(url,None,headers) #The assembled request
response = urllib.request.urlopen(request)
data = response.read() # The data u need

NSE website has changed and the older scripts are semi-optimum to current website. This snippet can gather daily details of security. Details include symbol, security type, previous close, open price, high price, low price, average price, traded quantity, turnover, number of trades, deliverable quantities and ratio of delivered vs traded in percentage. These conveniently presented as list of dictionary form.

Python 3.X version with requests and BeautifulSoup

from requests import get
from csv import DictReader
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as Soup
from datetime import date
from io import StringIO 

SECURITY_NAME="3MINDIA" # Change this to get quote for another stock
START_DATE= date(2017, 1, 1) # Start date of stock quote data DD-MM-YYYY
END_DATE= date(2017, 9, 14)  # End date of stock quote data DD-MM-YYYY


BASE_URL = "https://www.nseindia.com/products/dynaContent/common/productsSymbolMapping.jsp?symbol={security}&segmentLink=3&symbolCount=1&series=ALL&dateRange=+&fromDate={start_date}&toDate={end_date}&dataType=PRICEVOLUMEDELIVERABLE"




def getquote(symbol, start, end):
    start = start.strftime("%-d-%-m-%Y")
    end = end.strftime("%-d-%-m-%Y")

    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',
         'Referer': 'https://cssspritegenerator.com',
         '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'}

    url = BASE_URL.format(security=symbol, start_date=start, end_date=end)
    d = get(url, headers=hdr)
    soup = Soup(d.content, 'html.parser')
    payload = soup.find('div', {'id': 'csvContentDiv'}).text.replace(':', 'n')
    csv = DictReader(StringIO(payload))
    for row in csv:
        print({k:v.strip() for k, v in row.items()})


 if __name__ == '__main__':
     getquote(SECURITY_NAME, START_DATE, END_DATE)

Besides this is relatively modular and ready to use snippet.

import urllib.request

bank_pdf_list = ["https://www.hdfcbank.com/content/bbp/repositories/723fb80a-2dde-42a3-9793-7ae1be57c87f/?path=/Personal/Home/content/rates.pdf",
"https://www.yesbank.in/pdf/forexcardratesenglish_pdf",
"https://www.sbi.co.in/documents/16012/1400784/FOREX_CARD_RATES.pdf"]


def get_pdf(url):
    user_agent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.7) Gecko/2009021910 Firefox/3.0.7'
    
    #url = "https://www.yesbank.in/pdf/forexcardratesenglish_pdf"
    headers={'User-Agent':user_agent,} 
    
    request=urllib.request.Request(url,None,headers) #The assembled request
    response = urllib.request.urlopen(request)
    #print(response.text)
    data = response.read()
#    print(type(data))
    
    name = url.split("www.")[-1].split("//")[-1].split(".")[0]+"_FOREX_CARD_RATES.pdf"
    f = open(name, 'wb')
    f.write(data)
    f.close()
    

for bank_url in bank_pdf_list:
    try: 
        get_pdf(bank_url)
    except:
        pass

This error usually occurs when the server you are requesting doesn’t know where the request is coming from, the server does this to avoid any unwanted visit. You could bypass this error by defining a header and passing it along the urllib.request

Heres code:

#defining header
header= {'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'}

#the URL where you are requesting at
req = urllib.request.Request(url=your_url, headers=header) 
page = urllib.request.urlopen(req).read()

There is one thing worth trying is just to update the python version. One of my crawling scripts stopped working with 403 on Windows 10 a few months back. Any user_agents did not help and I was about to give up the script. Today I tried the same script on Ubuntu with Python (3.8.5 – 64 bit) and it worked with no error. The python version of Windows was a bit old as 3.6.2 – 32 bit. After upgrading the python on Windows 10 to 3.9.5 – 64bit, I don’t see the 403 any longer. If you give it a try, don’t forget to run ‘pip freeze > requirements.txt" to export package entries. I forgot it of course.
This post is a reminder for me too when the 403 comes back again in the future.