download image from url using python urllib but receiving HTTP Error 403: Forbidden

Question

I want to download image file from a url using python module \"urllib.request\", which works for some website (e.g. mangastream.com), but does not work for another (mangadoo

Answer 1

This website is blocking the user-agent used by urllib, so you need to change it in your request. Unfortunately I don't think urlretrieve supports this directly.

I advise for the use of the beautiful requests library, the code becomes (from here) :

import requests
import shutil

r = requests.get('http://mangadoom.co/wp-content/manga/5170/886/005.png', stream=True)
if r.status_code == 200:
    with open("img.png", 'wb') as f:
        r.raw.decode_content = True
        shutil.copyfileobj(r.raw, f)

Note that it seems this website does not forbide requests user-agent. But if need to be modified it is easy :

r = requests.get('http://mangadoom.co/wp-content/manga/5170/886/005.png',
                 stream=True, headers={'User-agent': 'Mozilla/5.0'})

Also relevant : changing user-agent in urllib