Home/ Questions/Q 8967985
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-06-15T17:22:07+00:00

Based on some quick examples found on SO and other sources, I am trying

  • 0

Based on some quick examples found on SO and other sources, I am trying to use Python urllib/urllib2 to submit a form in the following manner:

>>> import urllib, urllib2
>>> url = 'http://example.com'
>>> r_params = {'a':'test','b':'hooray'}
>>> e_params = urllib.urlencode(r_params)
>>> user_agent = 'some browser and such'
>>> headers = {'User-Agent': user_agent}
>>> req = urllib2.Request(url, e_params, headers)
>>> response = urllib2.urlopen(req)
>>> data = response.read()

I’ve gotten this to work, however, on the particular form I am looking for there are two buttons of type “submit”. e.g.:

<b><input type="submit" name="ButtonA" value="SUBMIT"></b>
<b><input type="submit" name="ButtonB" value="LINK"></b>

I believe the problem I’m having results from the current code choosing the wrong one. How do I get a response by submitting ButtonB rather than ButtonA? Some of the stuff I’ve read seems to indicate that I could try using mechanize, but I was hoping to keep this simple without having to read up and learn mechanize. Is there an easy way to do this, or do I need to suck it up and actually take the time to learn and understand what I’m doing?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It should be fairly simple, if that’s the case – you should look in to what exactly you’re doing. Specifically, you’re sending a POST request (urllib2.urlopen will send a POST request automatically if the data argument is supplied) with the data that would normally be supplied by the form element itself. In the case of multiple “submit” inputs, the name and value of the activated submit input is sent along with the rest of the form data.

    So, that’s all you have to do – include “ButtonB”:”LINK” as data.

    A quick reference so you can see how HTML does all the stuff it does:
    http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/interact/forms.html#submit-format

    • 0