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I keep a small cars.csv on my website for quickly trying out different pandas operations. It's very handy to keep around to help what a method you are unfamiliar with does, or give a teammate an example they can replicate.
Hosts switched
I recently switched hosting from netlify over to cloudflare. Well cloudflare does some work to block certain requests that it does not think is a real user. One of these checks is to ensure there is a real user agent on the request.
Not my go to dataset 😭
This breaks my go to example dataset.
pd.read_csv("https://waylonwalker.com/cars.csv") # HTTPError: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden
But requests works???
What's weird is, requests still works just fine! Not sure why using urllib the way pandas does breaks the request, but it does.
requests.get("https://waylonwalker.com/cars.csv") <Response [200]>
Setting the User Agent in pandas.read_csv
this fixed the issue for me!
After a bit of googling I realize that this is a common thing, and that setting
the user-agent fixes it. This is the point I remember seeing in the cloudflare
dashbard that they protect against a lot of different attacks, aparantly it
treats pd.read_csv as an attack on my cloudflare pages site.
pd.read_csv("https://waylonwalker.com/cars.csv", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0'}) # success
Now my data is back
Now this works again, but it feels like just a bit more effort than I want to
do by hand. I might need to look into my cloudflare settings to see if I can
allow this dataset to be accessed by pd.read_csv.