A Python library for automating interaction with websites
Project description
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Overview
A Python library for automating interaction with websites. MechanicalSoup automatically stores and sends cookies, follows redirects, and can follow links and submit forms. It doesn’t do JavaScript.
MechanicalSoup was created by M Hickford, who was a fond user of the Mechanize library. Unfortunately, Mechanize was incompatible with Python 3 until 2019 and its development stalled for several years. MechanicalSoup provides a similar API, built on Python giants Requests (for HTTP sessions) and BeautifulSoup (for document navigation). Since 2017 it is a project actively maintained by a small team including @hemberger and @moy.
Installation
PyPy3 is also supported (and tested against).
Download and install the latest released version from PyPI:
pip install MechanicalSoup
Download and install the development version from GitHub:
pip install git+https://github.com/MechanicalSoup/MechanicalSoup
Installing from source (installs the version in the current working directory):
python setup.py install
(In all cases, add --user to the install command to install in the current user’s home directory.)
Documentation
The full documentation is available on https://mechanicalsoup.readthedocs.io/. You may want to jump directly to the automatically generated API documentation.
Example
From examples/expl_qwant.py, code to get the results from a Qwant search:
"""Example usage of MechanicalSoup to get the results from the Qwant
search engine.
"""
import re
import mechanicalsoup
import html
import urllib.parse
# Connect to Qwant
browser = mechanicalsoup.StatefulBrowser(user_agent='MechanicalSoup')
browser.open("https://lite.qwant.com/")
# Fill-in the search form
browser.select_form('#search-form')
browser["q"] = "MechanicalSoup"
browser.submit_selected()
# Display the results
for link in browser.page.select('.result a'):
# Qwant shows redirection links, not the actual URL, so extract
# the actual URL from the redirect link:
href = link.attrs['href']
m = re.match(r"^/redirect/[^/]*/(.*)$", href)
if m:
href = urllib.parse.unquote(m.group(1))
print(link.text, '->', href)More examples are available in examples/.
For an example with a more complex form (checkboxes, radio buttons and textareas), read tests/test_browser.py and tests/test_form.py.
Development
Instructions for building, testing and contributing to MechanicalSoup: see CONTRIBUTING.rst.
Common problems
Read the FAQ.
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