Golfing with User Agents

8

Usually when performing an internet challenge, there's no problem with having to specify a user agent, but when it comes to dealing with Google, it changes.

Google blacklists the Urllib user agent, presumably to stop spambots, so you have to specify a user agent. This takes up many bytes, and is frankly rather annoying.

Example 1. Example 2. Example 3.

Note: I have updated my Python answers to use the tip suggested below

So how do you get around this problem using the shortest number of bytes?

Beta Decay

Posted 2015-08-07T08:38:30.030

Reputation: 21 478

Are you sure this question isn't missing a language tag? – Peter Taylor – 2015-08-07T15:07:27.560

@PeterTaylor Well although the question is oriented towards Python, I was hoping that the solution could be used to help with other languages – Beta Decay – 2015-08-07T15:12:03.587

Answers

4

The requests module, if allowed, is much shorter and easier than urllib in Python (2 and 3):

__import__('requests').get('url').text

On my computer, the user agent defaults to:

python-requests/2.3.0 CPython/3.4.3 Darwin/14.3.0

grc

Posted 2015-08-07T08:38:30.030

Reputation: 18 565

Asked: 2015-08-07T08:38:30.030

Viewed: 298 times

Active: 2017-02-23T17:21:28.973