Shell script to download a lot of HTML files and store them statically with all CSS

Question

I have posted on a science forum (roughly 290 questions) that I would like to get back by downloading them with all the associated answers.

The first issue is that I have to be logged on my personal space to have the list of all the messages. How to circumvent this first barrier to be able with a shell script or a single wget command to get back all URL and their content. Can I pass to wgeta login and a password to be logged and redirected to the appropriate URL obtaining the list of all messages?

Once this first issue will be solved, the second issue is that I have to start from 6 different menu pages that all contain the title and the link of the questions.

Moreover, concerning some of my questions, the answers and the discussions may be on multiple pages.

So I wonder if I could achieve this operation of global downloading knowing I would like to store them statically with local CSS stored also on my computer (to keep the same format into my browser when I consult them on my PC).

The URL of the first menu page of questions is (once I am logged on the website : that could be an issue also to download with wget if I am obliged to be connected).

An example of URL containing the list of messages, once I am logged, is:

https://forums.futura-sciences.com/search.php?searchid=22897684

The other pages (there all 6 or 7 pages of discussions title in total appering in the main menu page) have the format: "https://forums.futura-sciences.com/search.php?searchid=22897684&pp=&page=2" (for page 2).

https://forums.futura-sciences.com/search.php?searchid=22897684&pp=&page=5 (for page 5)

One can see on each of these pages the title and the link of each of the discussions that I would like to download with also CSS (knowing each discussion may contain multiple pages also) :

for example the first page of discussion "https://forums.futura-sciences.com/archives/804364-demonstration-dilatation-temps.html"

has page 2: "https://forums.futura-sciences.com/archives/804364-demonstration-dilatation-temps-2.html"

and page 3: "https://forums.futura-sciences.com/archives/804364-demonstration-dilatation-temps-3.html"

Naively, I tried to do all this with only one command (with the example of URL on my personal space that I have taken at the beginning of post, i.e "https://forums.futura-sciences.com/search.php?searchid=22897684"):

wget -r --no-check-certificate --html-extension --convert-links "https://forums.futura-sciences.com/search.php?searchid=22897684"

but unfortunately, this command downloads all files, and even maybe not what I want, i.e my discussions.

I don't know what the approach to use: must I firstly store all URL in a file (with all sub-pages containing all answers and the global discussion for each of mu initial question)?

And after, I could do maybe a wget -i all_URL_questions.txt. How can I carry out this operation?

Update

My issue needs a script, I tried with Python the following things:

1)

import urllib, urllib2, cookielib

username = 'USERNAME'
password = 'PASSWORD'

cj = cookielib.CookieJar()
opener = urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor(cj))
login_data = urllib.urlencode({'username' : username, 'password' : password})
opener.open('https://forums.futura-sciences.com/login.php', login_data)
resp = opener.open('https://forums.futura-sciences.com/search.php?do=finduser&userid=253205&contenttype=vBForum_Post&showposts=1')
print resp.read()

But the page printed is not the page of my home into personal space.

2)

import requests

# Fill in your details here to be posted to the login form.
payload = { 
    'inUserName': 'USERNAME',
    'inUserPass': 'PASSWORD'
}

# Use 'with' to ensure the session context is closed after use.
with requests.Session() as s:
    p = s.post('https://forums.futura-sciences.com/login.php?do=login', data=payload)
    # print the html returned or something more intelligent to see if it's a successful login page.
    print p.text.encode('utf8')

    # An authorised request.
    r = s.get('https://forums.futura-sciences.com/search.php?do=finduser&userid=253205&contenttype=vBForum_Post&showposts=1')
    print r.text.encode('utf8')

Here too, this doesn't work

3)

import requests
import bs4 

site_url = 'https://forums.futura-sciences.com/login.php?do=login'
userid = 'USERNAME'
password = 'PASSWWORD'

file_url = 'https://forums.futura-sciences.com/search.php?do=finduser&userid=253205&contenttype=vBForum_Post&showposts=1' 
o_file = 'abc.html'  

# create session
s = requests.Session()
# GET request. This will generate cookie for you
s.get(site_url)
# login to site.
s.post(site_url, data={'vb_login_username': userid, 'vb_login_password': password})
# Next thing will be to visit URL for file you would like to download.
r = s.get(file_url)

# Download file
with open(o_file, 'wb') as output:
    output.write(r.content)
print("requests:: File {o_file} downloaded successfully!")

# Close session once all work done
s.close()

Same thing, the content is wrong

4)

from selenium import webdriver
    
# To prevent download dialog
profile = webdriver.FirefoxProfile()
profile.set_preference('browser.download.folderList', 2) # custom location
profile.set_preference('browser.download.manager.showWhenStarting', False)
profile.set_preference('browser.download.dir', '/tmp')
profile.set_preference('browser.helperApps.neverAsk.saveToDisk', 'text/csv')

webdriver.get('https://forums.futura-sciences.com/')
webdriver.find_element_by_id('ID').send_keys('USERNAME')
webdriver.find_element_by_id ('ID').send_keys('PASSWORD')
webdriver.find_element_by_id('submit').click()
browser = webdriver.Firefox()
browser.get('https://forums.futura-sciences.com/search.php?do=finduser&userid=253205&contenttype=vBForum_Post&showposts=1')

Still not getting to log in with USERNAME and PASSSWORD and get content of homepage of personal space

5)

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.firefox.webdriver import FirefoxProfile
from selenium.webdriver.firefox.options import Options
from selenium.webdriver.common.desired_capabilities import DesiredCapabilities
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
import time

def MS_login(username, passwd):  # call this with username and password

firefox_capabilities = DesiredCapabilities.FIREFOX
    firefox_capabilities['moz:webdriverClick'] = False
    driver = webdriver.Firefox(capabilities=firefox_capabilities)
    fp = webdriver.FirefoxProfile()
    fp.set_preference("browser.download.folderList", 2) # 0 means to download to the desktop, 1 means to download to the default "Downloads" directory, 2 means to use the directory
    fp.set_preference("browser.download.dir","/Users/user/work_archives_futura/")
    driver.get('https://forums.futura-sciences.com/') # change the url to your website
    time.sleep(5) # wait for redirection and rendering
    driver.delete_all_cookies() # clean up the prior login sessions
    driver.find_element_by_xpath("//input[@name='vb_login_username']").send_keys(username)

elem  = WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(EC.visibility_of_element_located((By.XPATH, "//input[@name='vb_login_password']")))
    elem.send_keys(Keys.TAB)

driver.find_element_by_xpath("//input[@type='submit']").click()

    print("success !!!!")

driver.close() # close the browser
    return driver

if __name__ == '__main__':
    MS_login("USERNAME","PASSWORD")

The window is well opened, username filled but impossible to fill or submit the password and click on submit.

PS: the main issue could come from that password field has display:none property, So I can't simulate TAB operation to password field and pass it, once I have put the login.

Answer 1

It seems you're pretty knowledgeable already about scraping using the various methods. All that was missing were the correct field names in the post request.

I used the chrome dev tools (f12 - then go to networking tab). With this open if you login and quickly stop the browser window from redirecting, you'll be able to see the full request to login.php and look at the fields etc.

With that I was able to build this for you. It includes a nice dumping function for responses. To test my code works you can use your real password for positive case and the bad password line for negative case.

import requests
import json

s = requests.Session()

def dumpResponseData(r, fileName):
    print(r.status_code)

    print(json.dumps(dict(r.headers), indent=1))
    
    cookieDict = s.cookies.get_dict()
    print(json.dumps(cookieDict, indent=1))
    
    outfile = open(fileName, mode="w")
    outfile.write(r.text)
    outfile.close()

username = "your-username"
password = "your-password"
# password = "bad password"

def step1():
    data = dict()
    data["do"] = "login"
    data["vb_login_md5password"] = ""
    data["vb_login_md5password_utf"] = ""
    data["s"] = ""
    data["securitytoken"] = "guest"
    data["url"] = "/search.php?do=finduser&userid=1077817&contenttype=vBForum_Post&showposts=1"
    data["vb_login_username"] = username
    data["vb_login_password"] = password

    p = s.post('https://forums.futura-sciences.com/login.php?do=login', data=data)

    # Logged In?
    if "vbseo_loggedin" in s.cookies.keys():
        print("Logged In!")
    else:
        print("Login Failed :(")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    step1()

I don't have any posts in my newly created Futura account so I can't really do any more testing for you - I don't want to spam their forum with garbage.

But I would probably start by doing a request of post search url and scrape the links using bs4.

Then you could probably just use wget -r for each link you've scraped.

Answer 2

@Researcher is correct on their advice when it comes to the requests library. You are not posting all of the request params that the browser would send. Overall, I think it will be difficult to get requests to pull everything when you factor in static content and client side javascript

Your selenium code from section 4 has a few mistakes in it:

 # yours
webdriver.find_element_by_id('ID').send_keys('USERNAME')
webdriver.find_element_by_id ('ID').send_keys('PASSWORD')
webdriver.find_element_by_id('submit').click()

# should be
webdriver.find_element_by_id('vb_login_username').send_keys('USERNAME')
webdriver.find_element_by_id('vb_login_password').send_keys('PASSWORD')
webdriver.find_element_by_xpath("//input[@type='submit']").click()

You may need to fiddle with the xpath for the submit button.

Hint: You can debug along the way by taking a screenshots :

webdriver.find_element_by_id('vb_login_username').send_keys('USERNAME')
webdriver.find_element_by_id('vb_login_password').send_keys('PASSWORD')

webdriver.get_screenshot_as_file('before_submit.png')
webdriver.find_element_by_xpath("//input[@type='submit']").click()
webdriver.get_screenshot_as_file('after_submit.png')