Programmatic Form Submit

Question

I want to scrape the contents of a webpage. The contents are produced after a form on that site has been filled in and submitted.

I\'ve read on how to scrape the en

Answer 1

From a similar question - options-for-html-scraping - you can learn that with Python you can use Beautiful Soup.

Beautiful Soup is a Python HTML/XML parser designed for quick turnaround projects like screen-scraping. Three features make it powerful:

1. Beautiful Soup won't choke if you give it bad markup. It yields a parse tree that makes approximately as much sense as your original document. This is usually good enough to collect the data you need and run away.
2. Beautiful Soup provides a few simple methods and Pythonic idioms for navigating, searching, and modifying a parse tree: a toolkit for dissecting a document and extracting what you need. You don't have to create a custom parser for each application.
3. Beautiful Soup automatically converts incoming documents to Unicode and outgoing documents to UTF-8. You don't have to think about encodings, unless the document doesn't specify an encoding and Beautiful Soup can't autodetect one. Then you just have to specify the original encoding.

The unusual name caught the attention of our host, November 12, 2008.