Here is my take on it for Python 3, done without any external libraries (StackOverflow). After login you can use BeautifulSoup, or any other kind of scraping, if you did login without 3d party libraries/modules you can do scraping as well.
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()
A short additional info, regarding your original code...
That is usually good enough if you do NOT have a login page. But with modern logins, you usually have cookies, checking of referal page, user agent code, tokens, if not more (like captcha's). Websites don't like to be scraped, and they fight it. It's also called good security.
So in addition to just doing the request as you initially did you have to:
- take the cookie of the page, and serve it back during login
- know the page's referal, usually you can just push the login page to the login-action page
- fake the agent, if you announce yourself as "Python 3" agent (default) you are maybe just getting blocked right away
- scrape the token (as in my case) and serve it back in login
- package your payload (user, pass, token, and other stuff), encode it properly, and submit it as DATA to trigger the POST method
- etc.
So yeah, with built-in libraries, code baloons a bit as soon as login page is involved.
With 3rd party it's somewhat shorter, but as much as I researched, you again have to think about referals, agents, scraping tokens, etc. No lib will do that automagically, as each page works slightly differently (some will need fake agent, some won't, some have tokens, some not, some name them differently, etc).
If you strip my code of comments and extras, and shorten it a bit, you can make it a function that takes in 5 arguments and has 15 lines or less.
Cheers!
