python web form fill

because_I_can

Hi,
Im new to python (used to use perl) and i want to fill out a form on a site called easynews.com
here it is in html


[PHP] <td align=left valign=bottom nowrap>
<form action="http://www.easynews.com/login/&quot; method=post name="login">
<font face=arial size="+1"><u><b>MEMBERS LOGIN</b></u></font><br><br>
<font face=arial size=-1>USERNAME:</font><br>
<input type="text" name="username" size=15 maxlength=15><br>
<font face=arial size=-1>PASSWORD:</font><br>
<input type="password" name="password" size=15 maxlength=15><br>
<input type="submit" value="login"><br>
</form>
</td>[/PHP]

would i be right in saying this is a POST method?

My python code looks like this but unfortunaley it doenst work!!

[PHP]#!/usr/bin/python
import urllib

data = urllib.urlencode({"username" : "XXXXXX", "password" : "XXXXXXX"})
f = urllib.urlopen("http://www.easynews.com",data)
s = f.read()
print s[/PHP]


And neither does something similiar in perl!!
Help appreciated!
Ive googled this a lot and got nothing useful really
Thanks


aside - im not so sure about python - i mean does it seriously force you to start every line at the cursor position 0?

rsynnott

because_I_can wrote:

Hi,
Im new to python (used to use perl) and i want to fill out a form on a site called easynews.com
here it is in html


[PHP] <td align=left valign=bottom nowrap>
<form action="http://www.easynews.com/login/&quot; method=post name="login">
<font face=arial size="+1"><u><b>MEMBERS LOGIN</b></u></font><br><br>
<font face=arial size=-1>USERNAME:</font><br>
<input type="text" name="username" size=15 maxlength=15><br>
<font face=arial size=-1>PASSWORD:</font><br>
<input type="password" name="password" size=15 maxlength=15><br>
<input type="submit" value="login"><br>
</form>
</td>[/PHP]

would i be right in saying this is a POST method?

My python code looks like this but unfortunaley it doenst work!!

[PHP]#!/usr/bin/python
import urllib

data = urllib.urlencode({"username" : "XXXXXX", "password" : "XXXXXXX"})
f = urllib.urlopen("http://www.easynews.com",data)
s = f.read()
print s[/PHP]


And neither does something similiar in perl!!
Help appreciated!
Ive googled this a lot and got nothing useful really
Thanks


aside - im not so sure about python - i mean does it seriously force you to start every line at the cursor position 0?

This looks correct, more or less. What error message do you get?

On your aside, what do you mean by start every line at the cursor position 0? It doesn't, certainly, although blocks must be indented correctly.

because_I_can

it doesnt give any error message- it just seems to ignore the data im posting to the form. I read the page after i submit the form into variable s.
printing s then just results in the exact same page as without printing s.

So it looks to me like the easynews server is looking for maybe a referrer or something. It doesnt like being filled out by a script i think, which would make sense.

Now i was looking at this : http://www.mayukhbose.com/python/IEC/index.php

and it looks like it will over come that problem as it essentially controls IE in the same way as i use my mouse keyb etc.

Im just installing it now and the win32com libraries for python it needs but im having some problems.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pywin32/

Apparently that needs python 2.6 but all i have is the 2.51 that comes with cygwin. And i cant find 2.6 anyplace online. In fact i dont even think its released yet from looking on python.org

http://www.python.org/download/


Maybe i'll get an older release of that python extensions and it should do. Very wierd why its asking for 2.6 though!


Oh and im starting to like python. Its seems better than perl in terms of having lots of things included and no huge need to go messing around with modules etc.

python to exe looks cool as well and it seems like python has lots of simple gui toolkits modern looking which beats perl hands down.

Thanks!