Changing user agent on urllib2.urlopen

Question

How can I download a webpage with a user agent other than the default one on urllib2.urlopen?

Answer 1

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')