Stateful, programmatic web browsing
mechanize - Automate interaction with HTTP web servers ##########################################################
|pypi| |build|
.. contents::
Stateful programmatic web browsing in Python
The browser class mechanize.Browser
implements the
interface of urllib2.OpenerDirector
, so any URL can
be opened not just http
.
Easy HTML form filling.
Convenient link parsing and following.
Browser history (.back()
and .reload()
methods).
The Referer
HTTP header is added properly (optional).
Automatic observance of robots.txt <http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html>
_.
Automatic handling of HTTP-Equiv and Refresh.
To install for normal usage:
.. code-block:: bash
pip3 install mechanize
To install for development:
.. code-block:: bash
git clone https://github.com/python-mechanize/mechanize.git
cd mechanize
pip3 install -e .
To install manually, simply add the mechanize
sub-directory somewhere on your
PYTHONPATH
.
See https://mechanize.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
python-mechanize was the creation of John J. Lee. Maintenance was taken over by Kovid Goyal in 2017.
Much of the code was originally derived from the work of the following people:
Gisle Aas -- [libwww-perl]
Jeremy Hylton (and many others) -- [urllib2]
Andy Lester -- [WWW::Mechanize]
Johnny Lee (coincidentally-named) -- MSIE CookieJar Perl code from which mechanize's support for that is derived.
Also:
Gary Poster and Benji York at Zope Corporation -- contributed significant changes to the HTML forms code
Ronald Tschalar -- provided help with Netscape cookies
Thanks also to the many people who have contributed bug reports and patches.
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.. |build| image:: https://dev.azure.com/divok/mechanize/_apis/build/status/python-mechanize.mechanize?branchName=master :target: https://dev.azure.com/divok/mechanize/_build/latest?definitionId=3&branchName=master :alt: Build status of the master branch