mechanize - Automate interaction with HTTP web servers

|pypi| |build|

.. contents::

Major features

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 

  _.

• Automatic handling of HTTP-Equiv and Refresh.

Installation

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

PYTHONPATH

Documentation

See https://mechanize.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Credits

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