How to use Python to login to a webpage and retrieve cookies for later usage?

Posted 4:28 AM / By tolly-2-bolly in cookies, httprequest, Python

import urllib, urllib2, cookielib

username = 'myuser'
password = 'mypassword'

cj = cookielib.CookieJar()
opener = urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor(cj))
login_data = urllib.urlencode({'username' : username, 'j_password' : password})
opener.open('http://www.example.com/login.php', login_data)
resp = opener.open('http://www.example.com/hiddenpage.php')
print resp.read()

resp.read() is the straight html of the page you want to open, and you can use opener to view any page using your session cookie.

Just look it up on Python-Issues. My own view is that it makes my job as a programmer much easier than most other languages because of all the stuff that Python takes care of: memory management, platform dependencies, etc.