HTTP Basic Authentication not working with Python 3

Question

I am trying to access an intranet site with HTTP Basic Authentication enabled.

Here's the code I'm using:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import urllib.request, base64, urllib.error

request = urllib.request.Request(url)
string = '%s:%s' % ('username','password')

base64string = base64.standard_b64encode(string.encode('utf-8'))

request.add_header("Authorization", "Basic %s" % base64string)
try:
    u = urllib.request.urlopen(request)
except urllib.error.HTTPError as e:
    print(e)
    print(e.headers)

soup = BeautifulSoup(u.read(), 'html.parser')

print(soup.prettify())

But it doesn't work and fails with 401 Authorization required. I can't figure out why it's not working.

Answer 1

UTF-8 encoding might not work. You can try to use ASCII or ISO-8859-1 encoding instead.

Also, try to access the intranet site with a web browser and check how the Authorization header is different from the one you are generating.

Answer 2

Encode using "ascii". This worked for me.

import base64
import urllib.request

url = "http://someurl/path"
username = "someuser"
token = "239487svksjdf08234"

request = urllib.request.Request(url)
base64string = base64.b64encode((username + ":" + token).encode("ascii"))
request.add_header("Authorization", "Basic {}".format(base64string.decode("ascii")))
response = urllib.request.urlopen(request)

response.read() # final response string