Python mechanize - two buttons of type 'submit'
I have a mechanize script written in python that fills out a web form and is supposed to click on the 'create' button. But there's a problem, the form has two buttons. One for 'add attached file' and one for 'create'. Both are of type 'submit', and the attach button is the first one listed. So when I select the forum and do br.submit(), it clicks on the 'attach' button instead of 'create'. Extensive Googling has yielded nothing useful for selecting a specific button in a form. Does anyone know of any methods for skipping over the first 'submit' button and clicking the second?
Answer
I tried using the nr parameter, without any luck.
I was able to get it to work with a combination of the name and label parameters, where "label" seems to correspond to the "value" in the HTML:
Here are my two submit buttons:
<input type="submit" name="Preview" value="Preview" />
<input type="submit" name="Create" value="Create New Page" />
... and here's the code that clicks the first one, goes back, and then clicks the second:
from mechanize import Browser
self.br = Browser()
self.br.open('http://foo.com/path/to/page.html')
self.br.select_form(name='my_form')
self.br['somefieldname'] = 'Foo'
submit_response = self.br.submit(name='Preview', label='Preview')
self.br.back()
self.br.select_form(name='my_form')
self.br['somefieldname'] = 'Bar'
submit_response = self.br.submit(name='Create', label='Create New Page')
There's a variant that also worked for me, where the "name" of the submit button is the same, such as:
<input type="submit" name="action" value="Preview" />
<input type="submit" name="action" value="Save" />
<input type="submit" name="action" value="Cancel" />
and
self.br.select_form(name='my_form')
submit_response = self.br.submit(name='action', label='Preview')
self.br.back()
submit_response = self.br.submit(name='action', label='Save')
IMPORTANT NOTE - I was only able to get any of this multiple-submit-button code to work after cleaning up some HTML in the rest of the page.
Specifically, I could not have <br/> - instead I had to have <br /> ... and, making even less sense, I could not have anything between the two submit buttons.
It frustrated me to no end that the mechanize/ClientForm bug I hunted for over two hours boiled down to this:
<tr><td colspan="2"><br/><input type="submit" name="Preview" value="Preview" /> <input type="submit" name="Create" value="Create New Page" /></td></tr>
(all on one line) did not work, but
<tr><td colspan="2"><br />
<input type="submit" name="Preview" value="Preview" />
<input type="submit" name="Create" value="Create New Page" /></td></tr>
worked fine (on multiple lines, which also shouldn't have mattered).
I like mechanize because it was easy to install (just copy the files into my include directory) and because it's pretty simple to use, but unless I'm missing something major, I think that bugs like this are kind of awful - I can't think of a good reason at all why the first example there should fail and the second should work.
And, incidentally, I also found another mechanize bug where a <textarea> which is contained within a <p> is not recognized as a valid control, but once you take it out of the <p> container it's recognized just fine. And I checked, textarea is allowed to be included in other block-level elements like <p>.