Using Wget with buggy URL

Question

I've got the following link, which is downloading a CSV file when put through a web browser.

http://pro.allocine.fr/film/export_classement.html?typeaffichage=2&lsttype=1001&lsttypeperiode=3002&typedonnees=visites&cfilm=&datefiltre=

However, when using Wget with Cygwin, with the command below, Wget retrieves a file, which is not a CSV file, but a file without extension. The file is empty, that is, has no data at all.

wget 'http://pro.allocine.fr/film/export_classement.html?typeaffichage=2&lsttype=1001&lsttypeperiode=3002&typedonnees=visites&cfilm=&datefiltre='

So as I hate to be stuck, I tried the following as well. I put the URL in a text file and used Wget with the file option:

inside fic.txt

'http://pro.allocine.fr/film/export_classement.html?typeaffichage=2&lsttype=1001&lsttypeperiode=3002&typedonnees=visites&cfilm=&datefiltre='

I used Wget in the following way:

wget -i fic.txt

I got the following errors:

 Scheme missing
 No URLs found in toto.txt

Answer 1

I think I can suggest some other options that will make your underlying problem more clear which is that it's supposed to be html, but there is no content (content-length = 0).

More concretely, this

wget -S -O export_classement.html 'http://pro.allocine.fr/film/export_classement.html?typeaffichage=2&lsttype=1001&lsttypeperiode=3002&typedonnees=visites&cfilm=&datefiltre='

produces this

Resolving pro.allocine.fr... 62.39.143.50
Connecting to pro.allocine.fr|62.39.143.50|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 
  HTTP/1.1 200 OK
  Server: nginx
  Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 09:54:44 GMT
  Content-Type: text/html; Charset=iso-8859-1
  Connection: close
  X-ServerName: WEBNX2
  akamainocache: no-store
  Content-Length: 0
  Cache-control: private
  X-KompressorName: kompressor7
Length: 0 [text/html]

2014-03-28 05:54:52 (0.00 B/s) - ‘export_classement.html’ saved [0/0]

Additionally the server is tailoring it's output based on how the browser identifies itself. using wget does have an option to include an arbitrary user-agent in the headers. Here's an example what happens when you make wget identify itself as Chrome. Here's a list of other possibiities.

wget -S --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_2) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/33.0.1750.152 Safari/537.36" 'http://pro.allocine.fr/film/export_classement.html?typeaffichage=2&lsttype=1001‌​&lsttypeperiode=3002&typedonnees=visites&cfilm=&datefiltre='

Now the output changes to export.csv, with type "application/octet-stream" instead of "text/html"

HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 
 HTTP/1.1 200 OK
 Server: nginx
 Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 10:34:09 GMT
 Content-Type: application/octet-stream; Charset=iso-8859-1
 Transfer-Encoding: chunked
 Connection: close
 X-ServerName: WEBNX2
 Edge-Control: no-store
 Last-Modified: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 10:34:17 GMT
 Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=export.csv