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Unable to access webpage with request in python

After some discussion with my problem on Unable to print links using beautifulsoup while automating through selenium
I realized that the main problem is in the URL which the request is not able to extract. URL of the page is actually https://society6.com/discover but I am using selenium to log into my account so the URL becomes https://society6.com/society?show=2
However, I can't use the second URL with request since its showing error. How do i scrap information from URL like this.

You need to log in first!
To do that you can use the bs4.BeautifulSoup library.
Here is an implementation that I have used:
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
BASE_URL = "https://society6.com/"
def log_in_and_get_session():
"""
Get the session object with login details
:return: requests.Session
"""
ss = requests.Session()
ss.verify = False # optinal for uncertifaied sites.
text = ss.get(f"{BASE_URL}login").text
csrf_token = BeautifulSoup(text, "html.parser").input["value"]
data = {"username": "your_username", "password": "your_password", "csrfmiddlewaretoken": csrf_token}
# results = ss.post("{}login".format(BASE_URL), data=data)
results = ss.post("{}login".format(BASE_URL), data=data)
if results.ok:
print("Login success", results.status_code)
return ss
else:
print("Can't login", results.status_code)
Using the 'post` method to log in...
Hope this helps you!
Edit
Added the beginning of the function.

Retrieving a form results with requests

I want to submit a multipart/form-data that sets the input for a simulation on TRILEGAL, and download the file available from a redirected page.
I studied documentation of requests, urllib, Grab, mechanize, etc. , and it seems that in mechanize my code would be :
from mechanize import Browser
browser = Browser()
browser.open("http://stev.oapd.inaf.it/cgi-bin/trilegal")
browser.select_form(nr=0)
browser['gal_coord'] = ["2"]
browser['eq_alpha'] = ["277.981111"]
browser['eq_delta'] = ["-19.0833"]
response = browser.submit()
content = response.read()
However, I could not test it because it is not available in python 3.
So I tried requests :
import requests
url = 'http://stev.oapd.inaf.it/cgi-bin/trilegal'
values = {'gal_coord':"2",
'eq_alpha':"277.981111",
'eq_delta':"-19.0833",
'field':" 0.047117",
}
r = requests.post(url, files = values)
but I can't figure out how to get to the results page - if I do
r.content
it displays the content of the form that I had just submitted, whereas if you open the actual website, and click 'submit', you see a new window (following the method="post" action="./trilegal_1.6" ).
How can I get to that new window with requests (i.e. follow to the page that opens up when I click the submit button) , and click the link on the results page to retrieve the results file ( "The results will be available after about 2 minutes at THIS LINK.") ?
If you can point me to any other tool that could do the job I would be really grateful - I spent hours looking through SO for something that could help solve this problem.
Thank you!
Chris

Here is working solution for python 2.7
from mechanize import Browser
from urllib import urlretrieve # for download purpose
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
browser = Browser()
browser.open("http://stev.oapd.inaf.it/cgi-bin/trilegal")
browser.select_form(nr=0)
browser['gal_coord'] = ["2"]
browser['eq_alpha'] = ["277.981111"]
browser['eq_delta'] = ["-19.0833"]
response = browser.submit()
content = response.read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(content, 'html.parser')
base_url = 'http://stev.oapd.inaf.it'
# fetch the url from page source and it to base url
link = soup.findAll('a')[0]['href'].split('..')[1]
url = base_url + str(link)
filename = 'test.dat'
# now download the file
urlretrieve(url, filename)
Your file will be downloaded as test.dat. You can open it with respective program.

I post a separate answer because it would be too cluttered. Thanks to #ksai, this works in python 2.7 :
import re
import time
from mechanize import Browser
browser = Browser()
browser.open("http://stev.oapd.inaf.it/cgi-bin/trilegal")
browser.select_form(nr=0)
#set appropriate form contents
browser['gal_coord'] = ["2"]
browser['eq_alpha'] = "277.981111"
browser['eq_delta'] = "-19.0833"
browser['field'] = " 0.047117"
browser['photsys_file'] = ["tab_mag_odfnew/tab_mag_lsst.dat"]
browser["icm_lim"] = "3"
browser["mag_lim"] = "24.5"
response = browser.submit()
# wait 1 min while results are prepared
time.sleep(60)
# select the appropriate url
url = 'http://stev.oapd.inaf.it/' + str(browser.links()[0].url[3:])
# download the results file
browser.retrieve(url, 'test1.dat')
Thank you very much!
Chris

Python post request for USPTO site scraping

I’m trying to scrape data from http://portal.uspto.gov/EmployeeSearch/ web site.
I open the site in browser, click on the Search button inside the Search by Organisation part of the site and look for the request being sent to server.
When I post the same request using python requests library in my program, I don’t get the result page which I am expecting but I get the same Search page, with no employee data on it.
I’ve tried all variants, nothing seems to work.
My question is, what URL should I use in my request, do I need to specify headers (tried also, copied headers viewed in Firefox developer tools upon request) or something else?
Below is the code that sends the request:
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
def scrape_employees():
URL = 'http://portal.uspto.gov/EmployeeSearch/searchEm.do;jsessionid=98BC24BA630AA0AEB87F8109E2F95638.prod_portaljboss4_jvm1?action=displayResultPageByOrgShortNm&currentPage=1'
response = requests.post(URL)
site_data = response.content
soup = BeautifulSoup(site_data, "html.parser")
print(soup.prettify())
if __name__ == '__main__':
scrape_employees()

All the data you need is in a form tag:
action is the url when you make a post to server.
input is the data you need post to server. {name:value}
import requests, bs4, urllib.parse,re
def make_soup(url):
r = requests.get(url)
soup = bs4.BeautifulSoup(r.text, 'lxml')
return soup
def get_form(soup):
form = soup.find(name='form', action=re.compile(r'OrgShortNm'))
return form
def get_action(form, base_url):
action = form['action']
# action is reletive url, convert it to absolute url
abs_action = urllib.parse.urljoin(base_url, action)
return abs_action
def get_form_data(form, org_code):
data = {}
for inp in form('input'):
# if the value is None, we put the org_code to this field
data[inp['name']] = inp['value'] or org_code
return data
if __name__ == '__main__':
url = 'http://portal.uspto.gov/EmployeeSearch/'
soup = make_soup(url)
form = get_form(soup)
action = get_action(form, url)
data = get_form_data(form, '1634')
# make request to the action using data
r = requests.post(action, data=data)

Login on a site using urllib

I'm trying to get information from this site http://cheese.formice.com/maps/#5865339 , but when i request using urllib.urlopen, its says that i need to login, i was using this code:
import urllib
data = {
'login':'Cfmaccount',
'password':'tfmdev321',
'submit':'Login',
}
url = 'http://cheese.formice.com/login'
data = urllib.urlencode(data)
response = urllib.urlopen(url, data)
What i'm doing wrong?

It's not using urllib directly, but you may find it easier working with the requests package. requests has a session object see this answer
import requests
url = 'http://cheese.formice.com/forum/login/login'
login_data = dict(login='Cfmaccount', password='tfmdev321')
session = requests.session()
r = session.post(url, data=login_data)
That will log you in to the site. You can verify with:
print r.text #prints the <html> response.
Once logged in, you can call the specific url you want.
r2 = session.get('http://cheese.formice.com/maps/#5865339')
print r2.content #prints the raw html you can now parse and scrape

It is possible to do this with only the standard library using a custom opener with a cookie processor. An example is provided below.
# Login to website using just Python 3 Standard Library
import urllib.parse
import urllib.request
import http.cookiejar
def scraper_login():
####### change variables here, like URL, action URL, user, pass
# your base URL here, will be used for headers and such, with and without https://
base_url = 'www.example.com'
https_base_url = 'https://' + base_url
# here goes URL that's found inside form action='.....'
# adjust as needed, can be all kinds of weird stuff
authentication_url = https_base_url + '/login'
# username and password for login
username = 'yourusername'
password = 'SoMePassw0rd!'
# we will use this string to confirm a login at end
check_string = 'Logout'
####### rest of the script is logic
# but you will need to tweak couple things maybe regarding "token" logic
# (can be _token or token or _token_ or secret ... etc)
# big thing! you need a referer for most pages! and correct headers are the key
headers={"Content-Type":"application/x-www-form-urlencoded",
"User-agent":"Mozilla/5.0 Chrome/81.0.4044.92", # Chrome 80+ as per web search
"Host":base_url,
"Origin":https_base_url,
"Referer":https_base_url}
# initiate the cookie jar (using : http.cookiejar and urllib.request)
cookie_jar = http.cookiejar.CookieJar()
opener = urllib.request.build_opener(urllib.request.HTTPCookieProcessor(cookie_jar))
urllib.request.install_opener(opener)
# first a simple request, just to get login page and parse out the token
# (using : urllib.request)
request = urllib.request.Request(https_base_url)
response = urllib.request.urlopen(request)
contents = response.read()
# parse the page, we look for token eg. on my page it was something like this:
# <input type="hidden" name="_token" value="random1234567890qwertzstring">
# this can probably be done better with regex and similar
# but I'm newb, so bear with me
html = contents.decode("utf-8")
# text just before start and just after end of your token string
mark_start = '<input type="hidden" name="_token" value="'
mark_end = '">'
# index of those two points
start_index = html.find(mark_start) + len(mark_start)
end_index = html.find(mark_end, start_index)
# and text between them is our token, store it for second step of actual login
token = html[start_index:end_index]
# here we craft our payload, it's all the form fields, including HIDDEN fields!
# that includes token we scraped earler, as that's usually in hidden fields
# make sure left side is from "name" attributes of the form,
# and right side is what you want to post as "value"
# and for hidden fields make sure you replicate the expected answer,
# eg. "token" or "yes I agree" checkboxes and such
payload = {
'_token':token,
# 'name':'value', # make sure this is the format of all additional fields !
'login':username,
'password':password
}
# now we prepare all we need for login
# data - with our payload (user/pass/token) urlencoded and encoded as bytes
data = urllib.parse.urlencode(payload)
binary_data = data.encode('UTF-8')
# and put the URL + encoded data + correct headers into our POST request
# btw, despite what I thought it is automatically treated as POST
# I guess because of byte encoded data field you don't need to say it like this:
# urllib.request.Request(authentication_url, binary_data, headers, method='POST')
request = urllib.request.Request(authentication_url, binary_data, headers)
response = urllib.request.urlopen(request)
contents = response.read()
# just for kicks, we confirm some element in the page that's secure behind the login
# we use a particular string we know only occurs after login,
# like "logout" or "welcome" or "member", etc. I found "Logout" is pretty safe so far
contents = contents.decode("utf-8")
index = contents.find(check_string)
# if we find it
if index != -1:
print(f"We found '{check_string}' at index position : {index}")
else:
print(f"String '{check_string}' was not found! Maybe we did not login ?!")
scraper_login()
Link to this script on GitHub

How to scrape a website which requires login using python and beautifulsoup?

If I want to scrape a website that requires login with password first, how can I start scraping it with python using beautifulsoup4 library? Below is what I do for websites that do not require login.
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import urllib2
url = urllib2.urlopen("http://www.python.org")
content = url.read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(content)
How should the code be changed to accommodate login? Assume that the website I want to scrape is a forum that requires login. An example is http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php

You can use mechanize:
import mechanize
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import urllib2
import cookielib ## http.cookiejar in python3
cj = cookielib.CookieJar()
br = mechanize.Browser()
br.set_cookiejar(cj)
br.open("https://id.arduino.cc/auth/login/")
br.select_form(nr=0)
br.form['username'] = 'username'
br.form['password'] = 'password.'
br.submit()
print br.response().read()
Or urllib - Login to website using urllib2

There is a simpler way, from my pov, that gets you there without selenium or mechanize, or other 3rd party tools, albeit it is semi-automated.
Basically, when you login into a site in a normal way, you identify yourself in a unique way using your credentials, and the same identity is used thereafter for every other interaction, which is stored in cookies and headers, for a brief period of time.
What you need to do is use the same cookies and headers when you make your http requests, and you'll be in.
To replicate that, follow these steps:
In your browser, open the developer tools
Go to the site, and login
After the login, go to the network tab, and then refresh the page
At this point, you should see a list of requests, the top one being the actual site - and that will be our focus, because it contains the data with the identity we can use for Python and BeautifulSoup to scrape it
Right click the site request (the top one), hover over copy, and then copy as
cURL
Like this:
Then go to this site which converts cURL into python requests: https://curl.trillworks.com/
Take the python code and use the generated cookies and headers to proceed with the scraping

If you go for selenium, then you can do something like below:
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import Select
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
# If you want to open Chrome
driver = webdriver.Chrome()
# If you want to open Firefox
driver = webdriver.Firefox()
username = driver.find_element_by_id("username")
password = driver.find_element_by_id("password")
username.send_keys("YourUsername")
password.send_keys("YourPassword")
driver.find_element_by_id("submit_btn").click()
However, if you're adamant that you're only going to use BeautifulSoup, you can do that with a library like requests or urllib. Basically all you have to do is POST the data as a payload with the URL.
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
login_url = 'http://example.com/login'
data = {
'username': 'your_username',
'password': 'your_password'
}
with requests.Session() as s:
response = s.post(login_url , data)
print(response.text)
index_page= s.get('http://example.com')
soup = BeautifulSoup(index_page.text, 'html.parser')
print(soup.title)

You can use selenium to log in and retrieve the page source, which you can then pass to Beautiful Soup to extract the data you want.

Since Python version wasn't specified, here is my take on it for Python 3, done without any external libraries (StackOverflow). After login use BeautifulSoup as usual, or any other kind of scraping.
Likewise, script on my GitHub here
Whole script replicated below as to StackOverflow guidelines:
# Login to website using just Python 3 Standard Library
import urllib.parse
import urllib.request
import http.cookiejar
def scraper_login():
####### change variables here, like URL, action URL, user, pass
# your base URL here, will be used for headers and such, with and without https://
base_url = 'www.example.com'
https_base_url = 'https://' + base_url
# here goes URL that's found inside form action='.....'
# adjust as needed, can be all kinds of weird stuff
authentication_url = https_base_url + '/login'
# username and password for login
username = 'yourusername'
password = 'SoMePassw0rd!'
# we will use this string to confirm a login at end
check_string = 'Logout'
####### rest of the script is logic
# but you will need to tweak couple things maybe regarding "token" logic
# (can be _token or token or _token_ or secret ... etc)
# big thing! you need a referer for most pages! and correct headers are the key
headers={"Content-Type":"application/x-www-form-urlencoded",
"User-agent":"Mozilla/5.0 Chrome/81.0.4044.92", # Chrome 80+ as per web search
"Host":base_url,
"Origin":https_base_url,
"Referer":https_base_url}
# initiate the cookie jar (using : http.cookiejar and urllib.request)
cookie_jar = http.cookiejar.CookieJar()
opener = urllib.request.build_opener(urllib.request.HTTPCookieProcessor(cookie_jar))
urllib.request.install_opener(opener)
# first a simple request, just to get login page and parse out the token
# (using : urllib.request)
request = urllib.request.Request(https_base_url)
response = urllib.request.urlopen(request)
contents = response.read()
# parse the page, we look for token eg. on my page it was something like this:
# <input type="hidden" name="_token" value="random1234567890qwertzstring">
# this can probably be done better with regex and similar
# but I'm newb, so bear with me
html = contents.decode("utf-8")
# text just before start and just after end of your token string
mark_start = '<input type="hidden" name="_token" value="'
mark_end = '">'
# index of those two points
start_index = html.find(mark_start) + len(mark_start)
end_index = html.find(mark_end, start_index)
# and text between them is our token, store it for second step of actual login
token = html[start_index:end_index]
# here we craft our payload, it's all the form fields, including HIDDEN fields!
# that includes token we scraped earler, as that's usually in hidden fields
# make sure left side is from "name" attributes of the form,
# and right side is what you want to post as "value"
# and for hidden fields make sure you replicate the expected answer,
# eg. "token" or "yes I agree" checkboxes and such
payload = {
'_token':token,
# 'name':'value', # make sure this is the format of all additional fields !
'login':username,
'password':password
}
# now we prepare all we need for login
# data - with our payload (user/pass/token) urlencoded and encoded as bytes
data = urllib.parse.urlencode(payload)
binary_data = data.encode('UTF-8')
# and put the URL + encoded data + correct headers into our POST request
# btw, despite what I thought it is automatically treated as POST
# I guess because of byte encoded data field you don't need to say it like this:
# urllib.request.Request(authentication_url, binary_data, headers, method='POST')
request = urllib.request.Request(authentication_url, binary_data, headers)
response = urllib.request.urlopen(request)
contents = response.read()
# just for kicks, we confirm some element in the page that's secure behind the login
# we use a particular string we know only occurs after login,
# like "logout" or "welcome" or "member", etc. I found "Logout" is pretty safe so far
contents = contents.decode("utf-8")
index = contents.find(check_string)
# if we find it
if index != -1:
print(f"We found '{check_string}' at index position : {index}")
else:
print(f"String '{check_string}' was not found! Maybe we did not login ?!")
scraper_login()