Automatically populate and submit HTML Forms

[rbt]

Grant Edwards wrote:
> On 2005-05-25, rbt <rbt at athop1.ath.vt.edu> wrote:
> 
>>How can I make a python client script connect to a Web server and 
>>automatically populate form fields and then submit the form?
>>
>>For example, say I wanted to check and see if 1924 was a leap year... 
>>how would I populate the 'year' field and then submit it for processing? 
>>I have no control of the server... just the client script.
>>
>><form action="cgi-bin/leapyear.py">
>> <p>Enter a year and find out if it's a leap year:
>> <input type="text" name="year" size="6">
>> <input type="submit">
>> <input type="reset">
>></form>
> 
> 
> Just use urllib() and pass the form data to the urlopen()
> method.  If given data, it will generate a "POST" request
> instead of a "GET".  Here's a snippet of code from an app of
> mine that "fills in a form" and submits it:
> 
>     postData = urllib.urlencode({'submit':'Remove','disp':'M','action':'change_Msgs'})
>     
>     for msgid in msgIDs:
>         postData += "&msgid="+msgid
> 
>     req2 = urllib2.Request("http://mc-s6.postini.com/exec/MsgCtr",postData)
>     rsp2 = ClientCookie.urlopen(req2)
> 
> In this code I've eyeballed the form and the field names are
> hard-wired into the code.  If your form doesn't change from one
> usage to the next, that's the simplest way to do it.
> 
> In my example I'm using ClientCookie and urllib2 to create/open
> the reqeust in two steps because the request seen above won't
> work without some cookie values previsouly established in code
> that I've snipped.  Otherwise all you'd need to do is something
> like this:
> 
>   urllib.urlopen('http://whatever',
>                   urllib.urlencode({'field1Name':'value1','field2Name':'value2'}))
>                   

Thanks Grant... I found ClientCookie and ClientForm here:

http://wwwsearch.sourceforge.net/

Two great Python modules that really simplify this!!!