fun with python mechanize

In the Perl world, there is WWW-mechanize module which is used as a web browser in perl to use to get load a webpage. In python there is a mechanize module that do precisely that.

To install just:
pip install mechanize

Lets assume that we have a webapp at address http://mywebapp

here

	import mechanize
	page = mechanize.urlopen('http://mywebapp')
	#list all the form on the page
	forms = mechanize.ParseResponse(page,backwards_compat=False)
	# Get the first form
	form = forms[0]
	# Put data into <input name='query' ....
	form['query'] = 'field'
	# submit it
	result = mechanize.urlopen(form.click())
	print result.read()

view raw gistfile1.py hosted with ❤ by GitHub

The code above shows how to open a page, fill in a form field, and submit it, and get the next page. It will print whole page in html, from the result of a query .

This is useful for automate access to a webpage, in my case, to test a webapp in the office. I also use this to do load test with the python multi mechanize. Pretty nifty as it is actually a browser itself.