CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythoncookies
mittelmania
mittelmania

Reputation: 3561

Python 3.4 HTTP POST request with cookies

I'm having trouble constructing a method that will do a HTTP POST request with headers and data (username and password) and will retrieve the resulting cookies.

Here's my latest attempt so far:

def do_login(username, password):
    headers = {"User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/39.0.2171.95 Safari/537.36",
               "Accept": "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8"}
    cj = http.cookiejar.CookieJar()
    req = urllib.request.build_opener(urllib.request.HTTPCookieProcessor(cj))
    data = {"Username": username, "Password": password}
    req.open("http://example.com/login.php", data)

But I keep getting exceptions whenever I try to change the method. Also, will the response cookies be stored in the CookieJar cj, or is that used only for sending request cookies?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1353

Answers (1)

mittelmania
mittelmania

Reputation: 3561

After some research it seems that the data cannot be passed directly as an argument to req.open, and it needs to be converted to a URL-encoded string. Here's the solution that worked for me:

headers = {"User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/39.0.2171.95 Safari/537.36",
           "Accept": "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8"}

cj = http.cookiejar.CookieJar()
req = urllib.request.build_opener(urllib.request.HTTPCookieProcessor(cj))
req.addheaders = list(headers.items())

# The data should be URL-encoded and then encoded using UTF-8 for best compatilibity
data = urllib.parse.urlencode({"Username": username, "Password": password}).encode("UTF-8")
res = req.open("http://example.com/login.php", data)

Upvotes: 1

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