July 14, 2021 . 3 MIN READ
The examples below are written for a website that does not exist (example.com), so cannot be run. There are also some working examples that you can run.
import re import mechanize br = mechanize.Browser() br.open("http://www.example.com/") # follow second link with element text matching regular expression response1 = br.follow_link(text_regex=r"cheese\s*shop", nr=1) assert br.viewing_html() print br.title() print response1.geturl() print response1.info() # headers print response1.read() # body br.select_form(name="order") # Browser passes through unknown attributes (including methods) # to the selected HTMLForm. br["cheeses"] = ["mozzarella", "caerphilly"] # (the method here is __setitem__) # Submit current form. Browser calls .close() on the current response on # navigation, so this closes response1 response2 = br.submit() # print currently selected form (don't call .submit() on this, use br.submit()) print br.form response3 = br.back() # back to cheese shop (same data as response1) # the history mechanism returns cached response objects # we can still use the response, even though it was .close()d response3.get_data() # like .seek(0) followed by .read() response4 = br.reload() # fetches from server for form in br.forms(): print form # .links() optionally accepts the keyword args of .follow_/.find_link() for link in br.links(url_regex="python.org"): print link br.follow_link(link) # takes EITHER Link instance OR keyword args br.back()
You may control the browser’s policy by using the methods of mechanize.Browser’s base class, mechanize.UserAgent. For example:
br = mechanize.Browser() # Explicitly configure proxies (Browser will attempt to set good defaults). # Note the userinfo ("joe:password@") and port number (":3128") are optional. br.set_proxies({"http": "joe:password@myproxy.example.com:3128", "ftp": "proxy.example.com", }) # Add HTTP Basic/Digest auth username and password for HTTP proxy access. # (equivalent to using "joe:password@..." form above) br.add_proxy_password("joe", "password") # Add HTTP Basic/Digest auth username and password for website access. br.add_password("http://example.com/protected/", "joe", "password") # Don't handle HTTP-EQUIV headers (HTTP headers embedded in HTML). br.set_handle_equiv(False) # Ignore robots.txt. Do not do this without thought and consideration. br.set_handle_robots(False) # Don't add Referer (sic) header br.set_handle_referer(False) # Don't handle Refresh redirections br.set_handle_refresh(False) # Don't handle cookies br.set_cookiejar() # Supply your own mechanize.CookieJar (NOTE: cookie handling is ON by # default: no need to do this unless you have some reason to use a # particular cookiejar) br.set_cookiejar(cj) # Log information about HTTP redirects and Refreshes. br.set_debug_redirects(True) # Log HTTP response bodies (ie. the HTML, most of the time). br.set_debug_responses(True) # Print HTTP headers. br.set_debug_http(True) # To make sure you're seeing all debug output: logger = logging.getLogger("mechanize") logger.addHandler(logging.StreamHandler(sys.stdout)) logger.setLevel(logging.INFO) # Sometimes it's useful to process bad headers or bad HTML: response = br.response() # this is a copy of response headers = response.info() # currently, this is a mimetools.Message headers["Content-type"] = "text/html; charset=utf-8" response.set_data(response.get_data().replace("<!---", "<!--")) br.set_response(response)
mechanize exports the complete interface of urllib2:
import mechanize response = mechanize.urlopen("http://www.example.com/") print response.read()
When using mechanize, anything you would normally import from urllib2 should be imported from mechanize instead.
Much of the code was originally derived from the work of the following people:
Also:
Thanks also to the many people who have contributed bug reports and patches.
There are several wrappers around mechanize designed for functional testing of web applications:
zope.testbrowserSee the FAQ page for other links to related software.
I prefer questions and comments to be sent to the mailing list rather than direct to me.
http://wwwsearch.sourceforge.net/mechanize/
