[Octave-bug-tracker] [bug #58257] urlwrite 403 Forbidden crashes octave

[Ben Stanley]

URL:
  <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?58257>

                 Summary: urlwrite 403 Forbidden crashes octave
                 Project: GNU Octave
            Submitted by: benstanley
            Submitted on: Mon 27 Apr 2020 01:42:56 PM UTC
                Category: Octave Function
                Severity: 3 - Normal
                Priority: 5 - Normal
              Item Group: Segfault, Bus Error, etc.
                  Status: None
             Assigned to: None
         Originator Name: Ben Stanley
        Originator Email: 
             Open/Closed: Open
                 Release: 6.0.90
         Discussion Lock: Any
        Operating System: GNU/Linux

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Details:

The following command crashes octave 6.0.1:

[f, success, message ] = urlwrite(
'https://www.nasdaq.com/api/v1/historical/amzn/stocks/2010-04-27/2020-04-27',
'/tmp/HistoricalQuotes.csv' )

Expected result:
/tmp/HistoricalQuotes.csv contains data downloaded from nasdaq.com.

Actual result:
Octave creates an empty file /tmp/HistoricalQuotes.csv
Octave never returns to the command prompt >>
CTRL-C at the command prompt has no effect
Attempting to close the octave gui window has no effect.
It is necessary to kill and re-start octave to regain control.

Please note that I am able to download many other URLs successfully with
urlwrite. This particular nasdaq URL is special. It returns error 403
Forbidden unless you set the UserAgent to empty. The following commands
successfully download the content:

wget --output-document=HistoricalQuotes.csv --user-agent=""
https://www.nasdaq.com/api/v1/historical/amzn/stocks/2010-04-27/2020-04-27

curl --output HistoricalQuotes.csv --user-agent ""
https://www.nasdaq.com/api/v1/historical/amzn/stocks/2010-04-27/2020-04-27

Removing the --user-agent option from these commands causes them to fail as
well, but at least they don't lock up.

For the moment I plan to work around this problem by using the system command
to run curl or wget as shown above. I suspect that allowing urlwrite to set
the UserAgent would also solve the problem, but I did not find a way of doing
that.

I tested octave built from source, downloaded with mercurial.
I built the latest commit on the stable branch.

Octave successfully built.  Now choose from the following:

   ./run-octave    - to run in place to test before installing
   make check      - to run the tests
   make install    - to install (PREFIX=/usr/local)

   HG ID for this build is "50d83252f867"

make[2]: Leaving directory '/home/ben/octave-src/octave-7/.build'

After installing octave, I started it with the command
octave --gui






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