Question

I’m sorry to have to ask something like this but python’s mechanize documentation seems to really be lacking and I can’t figure this out.. they only give one example that I can find for following a link:

response1 = br.follow_link(text_regex=r"cheese\s*shop", nr=1)

But I don’t want to use a regex, I just want to follow a link based on its url, how would I do this.. also what is “nr” that is used sometimes for following links?

Thanks for any info

Answer 1

br.follow_link takes either a Link object or a keyword arg (such as nr=0).

br.links() lists all the links.

br.links(url_regex='...') lists all the links whose urls matches the regex.

br.links(text_regex='...') lists all the links whose link text matches the regex.

br.follow_link(nr=num) follows the numth link on the page, with counting starting at 0. It returns a response object (the same kind what br.open(…) returns)

br.find_link(url='...') returns the Link object whose url exactly equals the given url.

br.find_link, br.links, br.follow_link, br.click_link all accept the same keywords. Run help(br.find_link) to see documentation on those keywords.

Edit: If you have a target url that you wish to follow, you could do something like this:

import mechanize
br = mechanize.Browser()
response=br.open("http://www.example.com/")
target_url='http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2606.txt'
for link in br.links():
    print(link)
    # Link(base_url='http://www.example.com/', url='http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2606.txt', text='RFC 2606', tag='a', attrs=[('href', 'http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2606.txt')])
    print(link.url)
    # http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2606.txt
    if link.url == target_url:
        print('match found')
        # match found            
        break

br.follow_link(link)   # link still holds the last value it had in the loop
print(br.geturl())
# http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2606.txt