[Starson17]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

One possibility is to monkey path the open_novisit method on the browser instance to send the required referrer. so something like this

def get_browser(self):
    br = BasicNewsRecipe.get_browser(self)
    orig_open_novisit = br.open_novisit

    def my_open_no_visit(self, url, **kwargs):
        data = # add the referrer to the header
        return orig_open_novisit(url, data=data)

     br.open_novisit = my_open_no_visit
     return br

Thanks. I could never have solved this without your pseudocode tip. It still took a while to figure out, but it was fun. The line:

def my_open_no_visit(self, url, **kwargs):

had to be changed to:
def my_open_no_visit(url, **kwargs):

(complaints about number of arguments),

and the lines:

data = # add the referrer to the header
return orig_open_novisit(url, data=data)

were changed to :

req = mechanize.Request(url, headers = {'Referer':'http://referer_site.com/'})
return orig_open_novisit(req)

At least I got a chance to learn a bit more about mechanize. Thanks again for the tip, and enjoy your return home.