Question

I have looked through similar questions in stackoverflow yet seemingly no answers measures up. Now I have a cookies.txt in hands which is exported by a chrome extension named “cookies.txt”. I can execute a command “wget –load-cookies cookies.txt http://www.example.com” to download the webpage with the account authenticated.

However, I met a problem when I tried to use this file in my python script as follows,

import mechanize

cookie = 'cookies.txt'

cookiejar = mechanize.FileCookieJar(cookies.txt)

br = mechanize.Browser()

br.set_handle_robots(False)

br.set_cookiejar(cookiejar)

url = 'www.example.com'
response = br.open(url)
s = response.read()

f = open('test.html','w')
f.write(s)
f.close()

I only got a webpage without my account logged in after executing this script. And If I change the first several lines of code into this

import mechanize

cookie = 'cookies.txt'
cookiejar = mechanize.MozillaCookieJar()
cookiejar.load(cookie)

I got an error message “mechanize._clientcookie.LoadError: cookies.txt does not look like a Netscape format cookies file” executing the script.

I have no idea how I can get the authentication done with this cookies.txt given that this file works in wget command.

Answer 1

I was getting the same error until I added this to the top of my cookie file, and now works.

# Netscape HTTP Cookie File
# http://www.netscape.com/newsref/std/cookie_spec.html
# This is a generated file!  Do not edit.