The Login form

The first form that we will automate is the Login form, which is available at http://example.webscraping.com/user/login. To understand the form, we will use Firebug Lite. With the full version of Firebug or Chrome DevTools, it is possible to just submit the form and check what data was transmitted in the network tab. However, the Lite version is restricted to viewing the structure, as follows:

The important parts here are the action, enctype, and method attributes of the form tag, and the two input fields. The action attribute sets the location where the form data will be submitted, in this case, #, which means the same URL as the Login form. The enctype attribute sets the encoding used for the submitted data, in this case, application/x-www-form-urlencoded. Also, the method attribute is set to post to submit form data in the body to the server. For the input tags, the important attribute is name, which sets the name of the field when submitted to the server.

Note

Form encoding...