web scraping - Requests using Beautiful Soup gets blocked

Question

When I make requests using Beautiful Soup, I get blocked as a "bot".

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

reddit1Link = requests.get("https://www.reddit.com/r/tensorflow/comments/650p49/question_im_a_techy_35_year_old_and_i_think_ai_is/")
reddit1Content =BeautifulSoup(reddit1Link.content,"lxml")
print(reddit1Content)

Then I get messages from Reddit saying that they suspected me as a bot.

What are possible solutions through Beautiful Soup? (I have tried Scrapy to use its Crawlera, but due to my lack of python knowledge, I cannot use it.) I don't mind if it is a paid service, as long as it is "intuitive" enough for a beginner to use.

Answer 1

There can be various reasons for being blocked as a bot.

As you are using the requests library "as is", the most probable reason for the block is a missing User Agent header.

A first line of defense against bots and scraping is to check the User Agent header for being from one of the major browsers and block all non-browser user agents.

Short version: try this:

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

headers = requests.utils.default_headers()
headers.update({
    'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0',
})

reddit1Link = requests.get("https://www.reddit.com/r/tensorflow/comments/650p49/question_im_a_techy_35_year_old_and_i_think_ai_is/", headers=headers)
reddit1Content =BeautifulSoup(reddit1Link.content,"lxml")
print(reddit1Content)

Detailled explanation: Sending "User-agent" using Requests library in Python