Submitting to a web form using python

If you want to pass q as a parameter in the URL using requests, use the params argument, not data (see Passing Parameters In URLs):

r = requests.get('http://stackoverflow.com', params=data)

This will request https://stackoverflow.com/?q=%5Bpython%5D , which isn't what you are looking for.

You really want to POST to a form. Try this:

r = requests.post('https://stackoverflow.com/search', data=data)

This is essentially the same as GET-ting https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/python , but I think you'll get the idea from this.

import urllib
import urllib2

url = 'http://www.someserver.com/cgi-bin/register.cgi'
values = {'name' : 'Michael Foord',
      'location' : 'Northampton',
      'language' : 'Python' }

data = urllib.urlencode(values)
req = urllib2.Request(url, data)
response = urllib2.urlopen(req) 
the_page = response.read()

This makes a POST request with the data specified in the values. we need urllib to encode the url and then urllib2 to send a request.