Python's urllib2 follows 3xx redirects to get the final content. Is there a way to make urllib2 (or some other library such as httplib2) also follow meta refreshes? Or do I need to parse the HTML manually for the refresh meta tags?
Here is a solution using BeautifulSoup and httplib2 (and certificate based authentication):
import BeautifulSoup
import httplib2
def meta_redirect(content):
soup = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup(content)
result=soup.find("meta",attrs={"http-equiv":"Refresh"})
if result:
wait,text=result["content"].split(";")
if text.strip().lower().startswith("url="):
url=text[4:]
return url
return None
def get_content(url, key, cert):
h=httplib2.Http(".cache")
h.add_certificate(key,cert,"")
resp, content = h.request(url,"GET")
# follow the chain of redirects
while meta_redirect(content):
resp, content = h.request(meta_redirect(content),"GET")
return content