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.

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();