Chapter 6. Interacting with Forms

In earlier chapters, we downloaded static web pages that always return the same content. Now, in this chapter, we will interact with web pages that depend on user input and state to return relevant content. This chapter will cover the following topics:

• Sending a POST request to submit a form
• Using cookies to log in to a website
• The high-level Mechanize module for easier form submissions

To interact with these forms, you will need a user account to log in to the website. You can register an account manually at http://example.webscraping.com/user/register. Unfortunately, we can not yet automate the registration form until the next chapter, which deals with CAPTCHA.

Note

Form methods

HTML forms define two methods for submitting data to the server—GET and POST. With the GET method, data like ?name1=value1&name2=value2 is appended to the URL, which is known as a "query string". The browser sets a limit on the URL length, so this is...