MSIE6 Python Question

Mon May 24 07:25:15 EDT 2004

"Kevin T. Ryan" <kevryan0701 at yahoo.com> wrote in message news:<40b1697d$0$3131$61fed72c at news.rcn.com>...
> Ralph A. Gable wrote:
> 
> > I'm a newbie at this but I need to control MSIE6 using Python. I have
> > read the O'Reilly win32 python books and got some hints. But I need to
> > Navigate to a site (which I know how to do) and then I need to get at
> > the source code for that site inside Python (as when one used the
> > View|Source drop down window). Can anyone point me to some URLs that
> > would help out? Or just tell me how to do it? I would be very
> > grateful.
> 
> I'm not sure why you need to go through IE, but maybe this will get you into
> the right direction:
> 
> >>> import urllib
> >>> f = urllib.urlopen('http://www.python.org')
> >>> f.readline()
>  '<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"\n'
> >>> f.readline()
>  '                      "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd" >\n'
> >>>
> 
> You could do:
> for line in f:
>         process(line)
> 
> just like you can with a file.  Check the urllib, urllib2, and other related
> modules (maybe httplib).  Hope that helps.

Sorry. I forgot to mention that I have tried that. The data I want is
being stripped out when I access the URL via urllib. I CAN see the
data when I go into IE and do view source but when I use urllib the
site intentionally blanks out the information I want. For that reason,
I would like to get it using IE6 if I can. If there are other ways to
fake out the site, I would be interested in that also. I thought that
perhaps the site was detecting the fact that I was not querying it
using a browser. I tried putting that into into the HTTP messages but
may not have done it right. At any rate couldn't get that to work. It
may be that the site is using cookies to be sure someone is not
getting the data. I haven't pursued that. Again that is another reason
I wanted to use IE6 (since I know it works). The data is on a site to
which I subscribe to a service. But the particular information is
available to anyone if he/she types in the url (as long as you are
using a browser).