How to use Python to login to a webpage and retrieve cookies for later usage?
I want to download and parse webpage using python, but to access it I need a couple of cookies set. Therefore I need to login over https to the webpage first. The login moment involves sending two POST params (username, password) to /login.php. During the login request I want to retrieve the cookies from the response header and store them so I can use them in the request to download the webpage /data.php.
How would I do this in python (preferably 2.6)? If possible I only want to use builtin modules.
Here's a version using the excellent requests library:
from requests import session
payload = {
'action': 'login',
'username': USERNAME,
'password': PASSWORD
}
with session() as c:
c.post('http://example.com/login.php', data=payload)
response = c.get('http://example.com/protected_page.php')
print(response.headers)
print(response.text)
import urllib, urllib2, cookielib
username = 'myuser'
password = 'mypassword'
cj = cookielib.CookieJar()
opener = urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor(cj))
login_data = urllib.urlencode({'username' : username, 'j_password' : password})
opener.open('http://www.example.com/login.php', login_data)
resp = opener.open('http://www.example.com/hiddenpage.php')
print resp.read()
resp.read()
is the straight html of the page you want to open, and you can use opener
to view any page using your session cookie.