Scraping a website with python 3 that requires login

Question

Just a question regarding some scraping authentication. Using BeautifulSoup:

#importing the requests lib  
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

#specifying the page
page = requests.get("http://localhost:8080/login?from=%2F")
#parsing through the api
soup = BeautifulSoup(page.content, 'html.parser')
print(soup.prettify())

From here the output, I think would be important:

 <table>
   <tr>
    <td>
     User:
    </td>
    <td>
     <input autocapitalize="off" autocorrect="off" id="j_username" name="j_username" type="text"/>
    </td>
   </tr>
   <tr>
    <td>
     Password:
    </td>
    <td>
     <input name="j_password" type="password"/>
    </td>
   </tr>
   <tr>
    <td align="right">
     <input id="remember_me" name="remember_me" type="checkbox"/>
    </td>
    <td>
     <label for="remember_me">
      Remember me on this computer
     </label>
    </td>
   </tr>
  </table>

This scrapes the website fine, but it requires a login. Here I am using the mechanicalsoup library:

import mechanicalsoup

browser = mechanicalsoup.StatefulBrowser()
browser.open("http://localhost:8080/login?from=%2F")
browser.get_url()
browser.get_current_page()
browser.get_current_page().find_all('form')
browser["j_username"] = "admin"
browser ["j_password"] = "password"
browser.launch_browser()

However it still won't let me login.

Has anyone used a scraping tool for python 3 that lets them scrape a site that has authentication?

Answer 1

I see you're using requests. The syntax for logging in to a site is as follows:

import requests
page = requests.get("http://localhost:8080/login?from=%2F", auth=
('username', 'password'))

Hope this helps! You can read more about authentication here: http://docs.python-requests.org/en/master/user/authentication/