Python's requests library timing out but getting the response from the browser

Question

I am trying to create a web scraper for nba data. When I am running the below code:

import requests

response = requests.get('https://stats.nba.com/stats/leaguedashplayerstats?College=&Conference=&Country=&DateFrom=10%2F20%2F2017&DateTo=10%2F20%2F2017&Division=&DraftPick=&DraftYear=&GameScope=&GameSegment=&Height=&LastNGames=0&LeagueID=00&Location=&MeasureType=Base&Month=0&OpponentTeamID=0&Outcome=&PORound=0&PaceAdjust=N&PerMode=Totals&Period=0&PlayerExperience=&PlayerPosition=&PlusMinus=N&Rank=N&Season=2017-18&SeasonSegment=&SeasonType=Regular+Season&ShotClockRange=&StarterBench=&TeamID=0&VsConference=&VsDivision=&Weight=')

requests are timing out with the error:

File "C:\ProgramData\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\requests\api.py", line 70, in get return request('get', url, params=params, **kwargs)

File "C:\ProgramData\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\requests\api.py", line 56, in request return session.request(method=method, url=url, **kwargs)

File "C:\ProgramData\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\requests\sessions.py", line 488, in request resp = self.send(prep, **send_kwargs)

File "C:\ProgramData\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\requests\sessions.py", line 609, in send r = adapter.send(request, **kwargs)

File "C:\ProgramData\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\requests\adapters.py", line 473, in send raise ConnectionError(err, request=request)

ConnectionError: ('Connection aborted.', OSError("(10060, 'WSAETIMEDOUT')",))

However when I hit the same URL in the browser, I am getting the response.

Anonymous Anonymous · Accepted Answer · 2017-10-21T11:30:39

Looks like the website you mentioned is checking for "User-Agent" in the request's header. You can fake the "User-Agent" in your request to make it look like it is coming from the actual browser and you'll receive the response.

For example:

>>> import requests
>>> url = "https://stats.nba.com/stats/leaguedashplayerstats?College=&Conference=&Country=&DateFrom=10%2F20%2F2017&DateTo=10%2F20%2F2017&Division=&DraftPick=&DraftYear=&GameScope=&GameSegment=&Height=&LastNGames=0&LeagueID=00&Location=&MeasureType=Base&Month=0&OpponentTeamID=0&Outcome=&PORound=0&PaceAdjust=N&PerMode=Totals&Period=0&PlayerExperience=&PlayerPosition=&PlusMinus=N&Rank=N&Season=2017-18&SeasonSegment=&SeasonType=Regular+Season&ShotClockRange=&StarterBench=&TeamID=0&VsConference=&VsDivision=&Weight="
>>> headers = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/61.0.3163.100 Safari/537.36'}

>>> response = requests.get(url, headers=headers)
>>> response.status_code
200

>>> response.text  # will return the website content

Python's requests library timing out but getting the response from the browser

3 Answers