Why do I get a 403 error when I try open a URL

Question

I am currently using the imdb api from http://imdbapi.org to get some information about a movie. When I use the API and try to open this url in java it gives me a 403 error. The url is supposed to return the data in JSON. Here is my code so far(Java 7):

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.net.MalformedURLException;
import java.net.URL;

public class Test {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        URL url =null;
        try {
            url = new URL("http://imdbapi.org/?q=batman");
        } catch (MalformedURLException e) {
            // TODO Auto-generated catch block
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
        InputStream is =null;
        try {
            is = url.openConnection().getInputStream();
        } catch (IOException e) {
            // TODO Auto-generated catch block
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
        BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader( new InputStreamReader( is )  );
        String line = null;
        try {
            while( ( line = reader.readLine() ) != null )  {
               System.out.println(line);
            }
        } catch (IOException e) {
            // TODO Auto-generated catch block
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
        try {
            reader.close();
        } catch (IOException e) {
            // TODO Auto-generated catch block
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
        System.out.println(line);
    }
}

Gabrila

That is indeed strange since this URL works for me. – Bombproof

Answer 1

You should set User-Agent:

System.setProperty("http.agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/28.0.1500.29 Safari/537.36"); 

or

URLConnection connection = url.openConnection();
connection.setRequestProperty("User-Agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/28.0.1500.29 Safari/537.36");
is = connection.getInputStream();

Sha

Yes, that's it: from a command line do something like curl -v --user-agent "Java/1.6.0_14" http://imdbapi.org/?q=batman and the 403 Forbidden error appears and the HTML body is The owner of this website (imdbapi.org) has banned your access based on your browser's signature. – Karolekarolina

The second one worked for me – Nicol