urllib and login with passwords

[Jive Dadson]

Hey folks!

There are various web pages that I would like to read using urllib, but
they require login with passwords. Can anyone tell me how to find out
how to do that, both in general and specifically for YouTube.com.

Thankee.

[Rob Williscroft]

Jive Dadson wrote in news:Sv*********************@fe08.news.easynews.co m in
comp.lang.python:

Hey folks!

There are various web pages that I would like to read using urllib, but
they require login with passwords. Can anyone tell me how to find out
how to do that, both in general and specifically for YouTube.com.

A typical pattern is submit a form to login and get a cookie back,
subsuquent request with the cookie set are then "loged in".

import cookielib, urllib2

cj = cookielib.CookieJar()

opener = urllib2.build_opener( urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor(cj) )

page = opener.open( LOGIN_URL, data = LOGIN_FORM )
page.close()

page = opener.open( DOWNLOAD_URL )

print page.read()
page.close()
You will need to work out what goes in LOGIN_FORM, it likely
something like:

LOGIN_FORM = "username=name&password=pass&submit-button=Some+value"

where username, password and submit-button are the name of the
controls on the form you would normally login from.

If the form has an enctype='multipart/form-data' then things
get a little more complex, possibly start here:

http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Coo.../Recipe/146306

Rob.
--
http://www.victim-prime.dsl.pipex.com/

[Jive Dadson]

Thanks, Rob! Some of that is beyond my maturity level, but I'll try to
figure it out. If anyone has specific info on about how YouTube does
it, I would appreciate the info.