Question

I try to perform a simple POST-request with urllib2.
However the servers response indicates that it receives a simple GET. I checked the type of the outgoing request, but it is set to POST.
To check whether the server behaves like I expect it to, I tried to perform a GET request with the (former POST-) data concatenated to the url. This got me the answer I expected.
Does anybody have a clue what I misunderstood?

def connect(self):
    url = 'http://www.mitfahrgelegenheit.de/mitfahrzentrale/Dresden/Potsdam.html/'
    user_agent = 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT)'
    header = { 'User-Agent' : user_agent }

    values = {
      'city_from' : 69,
      'radius_from' : 0,
      'city_to' : 263,
      'radius_to' : 0,
      'date' : 'date',
      'day' : 5,
      'month' : 03,
      'year' : 2012,
      'tolerance' : 0
    }

    data = urllib.urlencode(values)
    # req = urllib2.Request(url+data, None, header) # GET works fine
    req = urllib2.Request(url, data, header)  # POST request doesn't not work

    self.response = urllib2.urlopen(req)

This seems to be a problem like the one discussed here: Python URLLib / URLLib2 POST but I’m quite sure that in my case the trailing slash is not missing. 😉

I fear this might be a stupid misconception, but I’m already wondering for hours!

EDIT: A convenience function for printing:

def response_to_str(response):
    return response.read()

def dump_response_to_file(response):
    f = open('dump.html','w')
    f.write(response_to_str(response))

EDIT 2: Resolution:
I found a tool to capture the real interaction with the site, http://fiddler2.com/fiddler2/. Apparently the server takes the data from the input form, redirects a few times and and then makes a GET request with this data simply appended to the url.
Everything is fine with urllib2 and I apologize for misusing your time!

Answer 1

Just to close the question:
The problem really was, that the server did not expect a POST requests (although it should, considered the use case). So (once again) the framework was not broken. 😉