urllib.error.HTTPError: HTTP Error 404: Not Found Python while scraping data from Metacritic

Question

I'm trying to scrape movie ratings from Metacritic. Here's the part of the code which is throwing an error.

text = text.replace("_","-")
user_agent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.7) Gecko/2009021910 Firefox/3.0.7'
headers={'User-Agent':user_agent,} 
URL = "http://metacritic.com/" + text
request=urllib.request.Request(URL,None,headers)
try:
    response = urllib.request.urlopen(request)
    data = response.read()
    soup = BeautifulSoup(data,'html.parser')
    metacritic_rating = "Metascore: " + soup.find("span",class_="metascore_w").get_text()
    send_message(metacritic_rating,chat) 
except:
    pass

I modified what I had written using this: https://stackoverflow.com/a/42441391/8618880

I cannot use requests.get() because of this: urllib2.HTTPError: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden

I'm looking for a way to get the status code of the page. I was able to find out a way when I used requests.get().

I checked out all the answers with the title: urllib.error.HTTPError: HTTP Error 404: Not Found Python but could not find any help.

Any help is appreciated.

so what exactly are you wanting? You just want to print out the response code? — chitown88, Mar 29 '19 at 09:22
If you catch the `HTTPError` exception you can get the HTTP sttatus with `HTTPError.code`. — t.m.adam, Mar 29 '19 at 09:53

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 29 '19 at 10:24

I think this is what you want:

import urllib


user_agent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.7) Gecko/2009021910 Firefox/3.0.7'
headers={'User-Agent':user_agent,} 
URL = "http://metacritic.com/" + text
request=urllib.request.Request(URL,None,headers)

try:
    response = urllib.request.urlopen(request)
    data = response.read()
    soup = BeautifulSoup(data,'html.parser')
    metacritic_rating = "Metascore: " + soup.find("span",class_="metascore_w").get_text()
    send_message(metacritic_rating,chat) 
except urllib.error.HTTPError as err:
    #print(err.code)
    if err.code == 403:
        <do something>
    else:
        pass

Output:

urllib.error.HTTPError: HTTP Error 404: Not Found Python while scraping data from Metacritic

1 Answers1