Web Scraping using Python giving HTTP Error 404: Not Found

Question

I am brand new to Python and have not very good at it. I am trying to web scrape from a website called Transfermarkt (I'm a big football fan) but its giving me HTTP Error 404 when I try extract data. Here is my code:

from urllib.request import urlopen as uReq
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as soup

my_url = "https://www.transfermarkt.com/chelsea-fc/leihspielerhistorie/verein/631/plus/1?saison_id=2018&leihe=ist"




uClient = uReq(my_url)
page_html = uClient.read()
uClient.close()

page_soup = soup(page_html, "html.parser")


for che in chelsea:
          player = che.tbody.tr.td.table.tbody.tr.td["spielprofil_tooltip tooltipstered"]



print("player: " +player)

Error says:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Users\x15476582\Desktop\WebScrape.py", line 12, in <module>
    uClient = uReq(my_url)
  File "C:\Python36-32\lib\urllib\request.py", line 223, in urlopen
    return opener.open(url, data, timeout)
  File "C:\Python36-32\lib\urllib\request.py", line 532, in open
    response = meth(req, response)
  File "C:\Python36-32\lib\urllib\request.py", line 642, in http_response
    'http', request, response, code, msg, hdrs)
  File "C:\Python36-32\lib\urllib\request.py", line 570, in error
    return self._call_chain(*args)
  File "C:\Python36-32\lib\urllib\request.py", line 504, in _call_chain
    result = func(*args)
  File "C:\Python36-32\lib\urllib\request.py", line 650, in http_error_default
    raise HTTPError(req.full_url, code, msg, hdrs, fp)
urllib.error.HTTPError: HTTP Error 404: Not Found

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks guys x

Answer 1

As Rup mentioned above, your user agent may have been rejected by the server.

Try augmenting your code with the following:

import urllib.request  # we are going to need to generate a Request object
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as soup

my_url = "https://www.transfermarkt.com/chelsea-fc/leihspielerhistorie/verein/631/plus/1?saison_id=2018&leihe=ist"

# here we define the headers for the request
headers = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.13; rv:63.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/63.0'}

# this request object will integrate your URL and the headers defined above
req = urllib.request.Request(url=my_url, headers=headers)

# calling urlopen this way will automatically handle closing the request
with urllib.request.urlopen(req) as response:
    page_html = response.read()

After the code above you can continue your analysis. The Python docs have some useful pages on this topic:

https://docs.python.org/3/library/urllib.request.html#examples

https://docs.python.org/3/library/urllib.request.html

Mozilla's documentation has a load of user-agent strings to try:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/User-Agent