How to apply the user's HTML environment in a Python programme?

[BobAalsma]

Op vrijdag 21 september 2012 16:15:30 UTC+2 schreef Joel Goldstick het volgende:
> On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 9:58 AM, BobAalsma wrote:
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> > Op vrijdag 21 september 2012 15:36:11 UTC+2 schreef Jerry Hill het volgende:
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> >> On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 9:31 AM, BobAalsma wrote:
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> >>
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> >> > Thanks, Joel, yes, but as far as I'm aware these would all require the Python programme to have the user's username and password (or "credentials"), which I wanted to avoid.
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> >> No matter what you do, your web service is going to have to
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> >> authenticate with the remote web site.  The details of that
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> >> authentication are going to vary with each remote web site you want to
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> >> connect to.
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> >> --
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> >> Jerry
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> > Hmm, from the previous posts I get the impression that I could best solve this by asking the user for the specific combination of username, password and URL + promising not to keep any of that...
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> > OK, that does sound doable - thank you all
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> I recommend that you write your program to read pages that are not
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> protected.  Once you get that working, you can go back and figure out
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> how you want to get the username/password from your 'friends' and add
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> that in.  Also look up Beautiful Soup (version 4) for a great library
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> to parse the pages that you retrieve
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> >
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> > Bob
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> > --
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> > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
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> -- 
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> Joel Goldstick

Joel, 

I've spent some time with this but don't really understand my results - some help would be appreciated.
I've built a tester that will read my LinkedIn home page, which is password protected.
When I use that method for reading other people's pages, the program is redirected to the LinkedIn login page.
When I paste the URLs for the other people's pages in any browser, the requested pages are shown.

Bob