Setting a user agent
By default, urllib will download content with the Python-urllib/3.x user agent, where 3.x is the environment's current version of Python. It would be preferable to use an identifiable user agent in case problems occur with our web crawler. Also, some websites block this default user agent, perhaps after they have experienced a poorly made Python web crawler overloading their server. For example, http://www.meetup.com/ currently returns a 403 Forbidden when requesting the page with urllib's default user agent.
To download sites reliably, we will need to have control over setting the user agent. Here is an updated version of our download function with the default user agent set to 'wswp' (which stands forWeb Scraping with ...
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