How to use Python requests to fake a browser visit a.k.a and generate User Agent?

Provide a User-Agent header:

import requests

url = 'http://www.ichangtou.com/#company:data_000008.html'
headers = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/39.0.2171.95 Safari/537.36'}

response = requests.get(url, headers=headers)
print(response.content)

FYI, here is a list of User-Agent strings for different browsers:

  • List of all Browsers

As a side note, there is a pretty useful third-party package called fake-useragent that provides a nice abstraction layer over user agents:

fake-useragent

Up to date simple useragent faker with real world database

Demo:

>>> from fake_useragent import UserAgent
>>> ua = UserAgent()
>>> ua.chrome
u'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/32.0.1667.0 Safari/537.36'
>>> ua.random
u'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/36.0.1985.67 Safari/537.36'

Try doing this, using firefox as fake user agent (moreover, it's a good startup script for web scraping with the use of cookies):

#!/usr/bin/env python2
# -*- coding: utf8 -*-
# vim:ts=4:sw=4


import cookielib, urllib2, sys

def doIt(uri):
    cj = cookielib.CookieJar()
    opener = urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor(cj))
    page = opener.open(uri)
    page.addheaders = [('User-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0')]
    print page.read()

for i in sys.argv[1:]:
    doIt(i)

USAGE:

python script.py "http://www.ichangtou.com/#company:data_000008.html"

I used fake UserAgent.

How to use:

from fake_useragent import UserAgent
import requests
   

ua = UserAgent()
print(ua.chrome)
header = {'User-Agent':str(ua.chrome)}
print(header)
url = "https://www.hybrid-analysis.com/recent-submissions?filter=file&sort=^timestamp"
htmlContent = requests.get(url, headers=header)
print(htmlContent)

Output:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_8_2) AppleWebKit/537.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/24.0.1309.0 Safari/537.17
{'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; OpenBSD i386) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/36.0.1985.125 Safari/537.36'}
<Response [200]>