Cannot download this webpage

Question

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I am having some issues download the source of a webpage, I can view the webpage fine in any browser, I can also run a web spider and download the first page no problem. Whenever I run the code to grab the source of that page I always get 403 forbidden error.

As soon as the request is sent the 403 forbidden error is returned. Anyone have any ideas?

C#

string urlAddress = "http://www.brownells.com/";
HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(urlAddress);

HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();

if (response.StatusCode == HttpStatusCode.OK)
{
      Stream receiveStream = response.GetResponseStream();
      StreamReader readStream = null;

.................................

      response.Close();
      readStream.Close();

Appreciate any help.

Posted 9-May-15 12:11pm

theadmin

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Comments

Florian Braun 10-May-15 4:01am

I'd guess the owner of that website just don't want you to download his pages so he is checking for your useragent.

2 solutions

Solution 1

As said by Florian Braun the site checks the user agent and denies the download with a 403 error. You can try to trick the website, by changing the user agent:

C#

string urlAddress = "http://www.brownells.com/";
HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(urlAddress);
//this is the UserAgent string of Firefox 36.0, use your favourite browser's user agent string :)
request.UserAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; rv:36.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/36.0";
//get response as usual
HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();

Posted 10-May-15 0:06am

webmaster442

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theadmin · Accepted Answer · 2015-06-07T08:58:00

This works, hopefully others will benefit from it.

HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument doc = new HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument();
HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url);
request.AutomaticDecompression = DecompressionMethods.Deflate | DecompressionMethods.GZip;
request.UserAgent = @"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.135 Safari/537.36";

request.Accept = @"text/html";
HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();
     
if (response.StatusCode == HttpStatusCode.OK)
{
     Stream dataStream = response.GetResponseStream();
     using (StreamReader streamread = new StreamReader(dataStream))
     doc.Load(streamread);