Python: urllib/urllib2/httplib confusion

Question

I\'m trying to test the functionality of a web app by scripting a login sequence in Python, but I\'m having some troubles.

Here\'s what I need to do:

1. D

Answer 1

I had to do this exact thing myself recently. I only needed classes from the standard library. Here's an excerpt from my code:

from urllib import urlencode
from urllib2 import urlopen, Request

# encode my POST parameters for the login page
login_qs = urlencode( [("username",USERNAME), ("password",PASSWORD)] )

# extract my session id by loading a page from the site
set_cookie = urlopen(URL_BASE).headers.getheader("Set-Cookie")
sess_id = set_cookie[set_cookie.index("=")+1:set_cookie.index(";")]

# construct headers dictionary using the session id
headers = {"Cookie": "session_id="+sess_id}

# perform login and make sure it worked
if "Announcements:" not in urlopen(Request(URL_BASE+"login",headers=headers), login_qs).read():
    print "Didn't log in properly"
    exit(1)

# here's the function I used after this for loading pages
def download(page=""):
    return urlopen(Request(URL_BASE+page, headers=headers)).read()

# for example:
print download(URL_BASE + "config")

Answer 2

Besides the fact that you may be missing a cookie, there might be some field(s) in the form that you are not POSTing to the webserver. The best way would be to capture the actual POST from a web browser. You can use LiveHTTPHeaders or WireShark to snoop the traffic and mimic the same behaviour in your script.