Question

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python: urllib2 how to send cookie with urlopen request

If I have cookies in my browser, how can I have a python script use these saved cookies for a url request?

For a particular site, I’m looking to find a way for my python script to take the identity of me (as i’m logged in on the browser) and then make a request to the server. It does not need to read the cookies from disk, but rather I would like to just do something like this:

cookies = {"username": "USERNAME", "session": "xxxxxxx"...}
urlopen(url, cookies=cookies) # I know that this doesn't work, just showing you what I intend to do

Is there an easy way of doing this?

Answer 1

Cookielib is your friend here. But you’ll need a little more information from your browser than just the cookie name and value:

cookies = {"username": "USERNAME", "session": "xxxxxxx"...}

If you provide these values you should be able to recreate the session in your request:

cookies = [{
    "name": "username",
    "value": "USERNAME",
    "domain": "domain",
    "path": "path",
    "secure": "secure",
}]

Recreate the session with:

import cookielib
import urllib2

cj = cookielib.CookieJar()

for cookie in cookies:
    c = cookielib.Cookie(version=1,
                         name=cookie["name"],
                         value=cookie["value"],
                         port=None,
                         port_specified=False,
                         domain=cookie["domain"],
                         domain_specified=False,
                         domain_initial_dot=False,
                         path=cookie["path"],
                         path_specified=True,
                         secure=cookie["secure"],
                         expires=None,
                         discard=True,
                         comment=None,
                         comment_url=None,
                         rest={'HttpOnly': None},
                         rfc2109=False)
    cj.set_cookie(c)

opener = urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor(cj))
opener.open(urllib2.Request('http://www.example.com')

Untested code.