urllib.request.urlopen(url) with Authentication

Question

I've been playing with beautiful soup and parsing web pages for a few days. I have been using a line of code which has been my saviour in all the scripts that I write. The line of code is :

r = requests.get('some_url', auth=('my_username', 'my_password')).

BUT ...

I want to do the same thing with (OPEN A URL WITH AUTHENTICATION):

(1) sauce = urllib.request.urlopen(url).read() (1)
(2) soup = bs.BeautifulSoup(sauce,"html.parser") (2)

I'm not able to open a url and read, the webpage which needs authentication. How do I achieve something like this :

  (3) sauce = urllib.request.urlopen(url, auth=(username, password)).read() (3) 
instead of (1)

Solution 1

Have a look at the HOWTO Fetch Internet Resources Using The urllib Package from the official docs:

# create a password manager
password_mgr = urllib.request.HTTPPasswordMgrWithDefaultRealm()

# Add the username and password.
# If we knew the realm, we could use it instead of None.
top_level_url = "http://example.com/foo/"
password_mgr.add_password(None, top_level_url, username, password)

handler = urllib.request.HTTPBasicAuthHandler(password_mgr)

# create "opener" (OpenerDirector instance)
opener = urllib.request.build_opener(handler)

# use the opener to fetch a URL
opener.open(a_url)

# Install the opener.
# Now all calls to urllib.request.urlopen use our opener.
urllib.request.install_opener(opener)

Solution 2

You're using HTTP Basic Authentication:

import urllib2, base64

request = urllib2.Request(url)
base64string = base64.b64encode('%s:%s' % (username, password))
request.add_header("Authorization", "Basic %s" % base64string)   
result = urllib2.urlopen(request)

So you should base64 encode the username and password and send it as an Authorization header.