How to scrape a website which requires login using python and beautifulsoup?

Question

If I want to scrape a website that requires login with password first, how can I start scraping it with python using beautifulsoup4 library? Below is what I do for websites that do not require login.

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup    
import urllib2 
url = urllib2.urlopen("http://www.python.org")    
content = url.read()    
soup = BeautifulSoup(content)

How should the code be changed to accommodate login? Assume that the website I want to scrape is a forum that requires login. An example is http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php

Answer 1

You can use mechanize:

import mechanize
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import urllib2 
import cookielib ## http.cookiejar in python3

cj = cookielib.CookieJar()
br = mechanize.Browser()
br.set_cookiejar(cj)
br.open("https://id.arduino.cc/auth/login/")

br.select_form(nr=0)
br.form['username'] = 'username'
br.form['password'] = 'password.'
br.submit()

print br.response().read()

Or urllib - Login to website using urllib2