Fetch a Wikipedia article with Python

Question

I try to fetch a Wikipedia article with Python\'s urllib:

f = urllib.urlopen(\"http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Albert_Einstein&printable=yes\")         


        

Answer 1

The general solution I use for any site is to access the page using Firefox and, using an extension such as Firebug, record all details of the HTTP request including any cookies.

In your program (in this case in Python) you should try to send a HTTP request as similar as necessary to the one that worked from Firefox. This often includes setting the User-Agent, Referer and Cookie fields, but there may be others.