urllib2.HTTPError: HTTP Error 404: Not Found for valid url

Question

I'm using a python opengraph library to parse a website's opengraph tags https://github.com/erikriver/opengraph .

import opengraph
url = 'http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/10/20/uk-gun-owners-now-subject-to-warrantless-home-searches/'
og = opengraph.OpenGraph(url=url)
print og.to_json()

When I run this script I get the following error

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "test.py", line 16, in <module>
    raw = urllib2.urlopen(url)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 127, in urlopen
    return _opener.open(url, data, timeout)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 410, in open
    response = meth(req, response)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 523, in http_response
    'http', request, response, code, msg, hdrs)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 448, in error
    return self._call_chain(*args)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 382, in _call_chain
    result = func(*args)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 531, in http_error_default
    raise HTTPError(req.get_full_url(), code, msg, hdrs, fp)
urllib2.HTTPError: HTTP Error 404: Not Found

urllib2 is used under the hood to grab the html before it is parsed https://github.com/erikriver/opengraph/blob/master/opengraph/opengraph.py#L50-L52

Why am I receiving this 404 error? I can access this url from my browser and also retrieve the open graph tags for this url using this php library https://github.com/scottmac/opengraph .

The python library is able to retrieve the open graph tags for all other urls but this url seems to be an anomaly.

Answer 1

Updated:

You get a 404 response because your request hasn't passed a user-agent . Just installed opengraph on virtualenv to test it, it works after adding missing user-agent in header :

url = 'http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/10/20/uk-gun-owners-now-subject-to-warrantless-home-searches/'
req = opengraph.opengraph.urllib2.Request(url, headers={ 'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0' })
og = opengraph.OpenGraph()
og.parser(opengraph.opengraph.urllib2.urlopen(req).read())
og.to_json()

'{"site_name": "Fox News", "description": "Registered gun owners in the United Kingdom are now subject to unannounced visits to their homes under new guidance that allows police to inspect firearms storage without a warrant.", "title": "UK gun owners now subject to warrantless home searches", "url": "http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/10/20/uk-gun-owners-now-subject-to-warrantless-home-searches/", "image": "http://global.fncstatic.com/static/v/all/img/fn_128x128.png", "scrape": false, "_url": null, "type": "article"}'