jsoup posting and cookie

Gwindow picture Gwindow · Jun 22, 2011 · Viewed 59.9k times · Source

I'm trying to use jsoup to login to a site and then scrape information, I am running into in a problem, I can login successfully and create a Document from index.php but I cannot get other pages on the site. I know I need to set a cookie after I post and then load it when I'm trying to open another page on the site. But how do I do this? The following code lets me login and get index.php

Document doc = Jsoup.connect("http://www.example.com/login.php")
               .data("username", "myUsername", 
                     "password", "myPassword")
               .post();

I know I can use apache httpclient to do this but I don't want to.

Answer

Jonathan Hedley picture Jonathan Hedley · Jun 25, 2011

When you login to the site, it is probably setting an authorised session cookie that needs to be sent on subsequent requests to maintain the session.

You can get the cookie like this:

Connection.Response res = Jsoup.connect("http://www.example.com/login.php")
    .data("username", "myUsername", "password", "myPassword")
    .method(Method.POST)
    .execute();

Document doc = res.parse();
String sessionId = res.cookie("SESSIONID"); // you will need to check what the right cookie name is

And then send it on the next request like:

Document doc2 = Jsoup.connect("http://www.example.com/otherPage")
    .cookie("SESSIONID", sessionId)
    .get();