Python : Trying to POST form using requests

You can use the Session object

import requests
headers = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0'}
payload = {'username':'niceusername','password':'123456'}

session = requests.Session()
session.post('https://admin.example.com/login.php',headers=headers,data=payload)
# the session instance holds the cookie. So use it to get/post later.
# e.g. session.get('https://example.com/profile')

Send a POST request with content type = 'form-data':

import requests
files = {
    'username': (None, 'myusername'),
    'password': (None, 'mypassword'),
}
response = requests.post('https://example.com/abc', files=files)

I was having problems here (i.e. sending form-data whilst uploading a file) until I used the following:

files = {'file': (filename, open(filepath, 'rb'), 'text/xml'),
         'Content-Disposition': 'form-data; name="file"; filename="' + filename + '"',
         'Content-Type': 'text/xml'}

That's the input that ended up working for me. In Chrome Dev Tools -> Network tab, I clicked the request I was interested in. In the Headers tab, there's a Form Data section, and it showed both the Content-Disposition and the Content-Type headers being set there.

I did NOT need to set headers in the actual requests.post() command for this to succeed (including them actually caused it to fail)