Python: requests.get() method returns HTTP response 406

Question

I am trying to download some images from a webpage using the following code.  But requests.get(ilink)) returns HTTP response code 406. The variable "ilink" is the link to the image file. How can I fix the error?

def save_image_file(ilink, filename):

    response = requests.get(ilink))

    if response.status_code == 200:

        with open(filename, 'wb') as f:

            f.write(response.content)

    else:

        print("Bad response code :", response.status_code, ilink)

Answer 1

You need to pass the "headers" parameter in requests.get() method. It seems that the server you are trying to access does not allow requests without a user-agent.

Modify your code as follows and it should work.

def save_image_file(ilink, filename):
    ua = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.7) Gecko/2009021910 Firefox/3.0.7'
    response = requests.get(ilink, headers={"User-Agent": ua})
    if response.status_code == 200:
        with open(filename, 'wb') as f:
            f.write(response.content)
    else:
        print("Bad response code :", response.status_code, ilink)
 

If the above user-agent does not work, you can search for others and try them.