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Hi Senthil,
> I fail to see the bug in here. Robotparser module is for reading and
> parsing the robot.txt file, the module responsible for fetching it
> could urllib.
You're right, but robotparser's read() does a call to urllib.request.urlopen to
fetch the robots.txt file. If robotparser took a file object, or something like
that instead of a Url, I wouldn't think of this as a bug, but it doesn't. The
default behaviour is for it to fetch the file itself, using urlopen.
Also, I'm aware that you shouldn't normally worry about setting a specific
user-agent to fetch the file. But that's not the case of Wikipedia. In my case,
Wikipedia returned 403 for the urllib user-agent. And since there's no
documented way of specifying a particular user-agent in robotparser, or to feed
a file object to robotparser, I decided to report this.
Only after reading the source of 2.7.x and 3.x, one can find work-arounds for
that problem, since it's not really clear how these make the requests for the
robots.txt in the documentation.