How to open https Site and pass request?

[Nico Grubert]

Hi there,

I am trying to open an https site and pass a request to it in order to
simulate the submit of an HTML form on a https site that sets an
authentication cookie for a tomcat application, so the the URL I am
trying to open points to a web form provided by the tomcat webserver.

I tried (Python 2.3.5):

import urllib
import urllib2
the_url = "https://myserver/application/login.do"
user_agent = 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT)'
headers = { 'User-Agent' : user_agent }
values = { 'username' : 'myuser', 'password' : 'mypasswd' }
data = urllib.urlencode(values)
req = urllib2.Request(the_url, data)
handle = urllib2.urlopen(req)

This raises the following exception:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.3/urllib2.py", line 129, in urlopen
return _opener.open(url, data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.3/urllib2.py", line 331, in open
'unknown_open', req)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.3/urllib2.py", line 306, in _call_chain
result = func(*args)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.3/urllib2.py", line 914, in unknown_open
raise URLError('unknown url type: %s' % type)
urllib2.URLError: <urlopen error unknown url type: https>
Any idea, what I did wrong?

Regards,
Nico