Question

I have a bash script, that logs in with a cookie and saves a text file from a URL. I need to achieve the same thing in Python with Mechanize, but I can’t get it working. It’s only two lines of bash and it’s driving me mad. I’ve looked at the Mechanize docs, but can’t find out how to do it.

#!/bin/sh
base_url=https://myapp.url.com
sign_on_request="aK8Rj_mrVk3J-PDf9x6...LONG KEY...4ZPMd0w"
# Login
wget -q --keep-session-cookies --save-cookies savedcookie.txt --post-data="sign_on_request=$sign_on_request" -O - $base_url/login > /dev/null 2>&1
# Save CSV
wget -q --load-cookies savedcookie.txt -O output.txt $base_url/data

Here’s what I tried:

import mechanize
import cookielib

# Browser
br = mechanize.Browser()

# Cookie Jar
cj = cookielib.LWPCookieJar()
br.set_cookiejar(cj)

# Login
req = mechanize.Request("https://myapp.url.com/login", "sign_on_request=aK8Rj_mrVk3J-PDf9x6...LONG KEY...4ZPMd0w")
cj.add_cookie_header(req)
res = mechanize.urlopen(req)

# Download
f = br.retrieve('https://myapp.url.com/data')[0]
print f

Answer 1

Have you tried res = br.open("https://myapp.url.com/login", data=...) instead of mechanize.Request? Seems you would need to use the browser you created to do the login if you expect it to be able to do the retrieval.