Question

As part of my quest to become better at Python I am now attempting to sign in to a website I frequent, send myself a private message, and then sign out. So far, I’ve managed to sign in (using urllib, cookiejar and urllib2). However, I cannot work out how to fill in the required form to send myself a message.

The form is located at /messages.php?action=send. There’s three things that need to be filled for the message to send: three text fields named name, title and message. Additionally, there is a submit button (named “submit”).

How can I fill in this form and send it?

Answer 1

import urllib
import urllib2

name =  "name field"
data = {
        "name" : name 
       }

encoded_data = urllib.urlencode(data)
content = urllib2.urlopen("http://www.abc.com/messages.php?action=send",
        encoded_data)
print content.readlines()

just replace http://www.abc.com/messages.php?action=send with the url where your form is being submitted

reply to your comment: if the url is the url where your form is located, and you need to do this just for one website, look at the source code of the page and find

<form method="POST" action="some_address.php">

and put this address as parameter for urllib2.urlopen

And you have to realise what submit button does.
It just send a Http request to the url defined by action in the form.
So what you do is to simulate this request with urllib2