CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#pythonwebclient
RaghavJhavar
RaghavJhavar

Reputation: 29

Odd 403 error using WebClient

I am trying to send a GET request to download the HTML content of http://footlocker.com/ :

Console.WriteLine(new WebClient().DownloadString("http://footlocker.com"));

But I get a 403 error. To test, I use Python to try and send a GET request (requests library) and I successfully received a 200 response as well as the HTML content:

r = requests.get('http://footlocker.com')
print(r.text)

To see the difference, I printed the headers in the Python request and this is what I got:

{'User-Agent': 'python-requests/2.13.0', 'Accept-Encoding': 'gzip, deflate', 'Accept': '*/*', 'Connection': 'keep-alive'}

So I tried to send the WebClient request with the Python requests User-Agent string:

WebClient wc = new WebClient();
wc.Headers[HttpRequestHeader.UserAgent] = "python-requests/2.13.0";
Console.WriteLine(wc.DownloadString("http://footlocker.com"));

But I still got a 403. What may be the difference between Python's request library and WebClient? Am I missing something obvious here? Why is this happening?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 455

Answers (1)

RaghavJhavar
RaghavJhavar

Reputation: 29

Figured it out, needed to add this header:

wc.Headers.Add("Accept", "*/*");

Final code:

WebClient wc = new WebClient();
wc.Headers.Add("User-Agent", "python-requests/2.13.0");
wc.Headers.Add("Accept", "*/*");
Console.WriteLine(wc.DownloadString("http://footlocker.com"));

Upvotes: 1

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