Question

I’m trying to dynamically fill a form in Python using Mechanize. However, when I inspected the source of the HTML page that has the form, I realized that some of the controls on the form have the same name. Here’s an excerpt from the form:

<form action="[some website]" method=post>
<table>
    <tr><td>
        <select NAME="mv_searchspec" size="1">      
            <option VALUE="1119">Fall 2011 (1119)</option> 
            <!-- other options here -->
        </select>
    </tr><td>
    <tr><td>
        <select NAME="mv_searchspec" size="1"> 
            <option VALUE="">Select Department</option> 
            <option VALUE="ACC">ACC</option> 
            <!-- other options here -->
        </select>
    </tr></td>
</table>
</form>

Is there a way to get the possible_items of each of the SELECT controls without identifying them by a name/id?

Answer 1

You can use BeautifulSoup to parse the response to get the select options

import mechanize
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
br = mechanize.Browser()
resp = br.open('your_url')
soup = BeautifulSoup(resp.get_data())
second_select = soup.findAll('select', name="mv_searchspec")[1]
# now use BeautifulSoup API to get the data you want

You can’t do something like br['mv_searchspec'] = 'foo' as obviously this is ambigious. You should be able to do this though

br.select_form(nr=0) # select index
controls = br.form.controls
controls[desired_index]._value = 'your_value'
...
br.submit()