https://mechanicalsoup.readthedocs.io/
A Python library for automating interaction with websites. MechanicalSoup automatically stores and sends cookies, follows redirects, and can follow links and submit forms. It doesn't do JavaScript.
MechanicalSoup was created by 8000 M Hickford, who was a fond user of the Mechanize library. Unfortunately, Mechanize is incompatible with Python 3 and its development stalled for several years. MechanicalSoup provides a similar API, built on Python giants Requests (for HTTP sessions) and BeautifulSoup (for document navigation). Since 2017 it is a project actively maintained by a small team including @hemberger and @moy.
PyPy and PyPy3 are also supported (and tested against).
Download and install the latest released version from PyPI:
pip install MechanicalSoup
Download and install the development version from GitHub:
pip install git+https://github.com/MechanicalSoup/MechanicalSoup
Installing from source (installs the version in the current working directory):
python setup.py install
(In all cases, add --user to the install command to
install in the current user's home directory.)
The full documentation is available on https://mechanicalsoup.readthedocs.io/. You may want to jump directly to the automatically generated API documentation.
From examples/expl_duck_duck_go.py, code to get the results from a DuckDuckGo search:
"""Example usage of MechanicalSoup to get the results from
DuckDuckGo."""
import mechanicalsoup
# Connect to duckduckgo
browser = mechanicalsoup.StatefulBrowser()
browser.open("https://duckduckgo.com/")
# Fill-in the search form
browser.select_form('#search_form_homepage')
browser["q"] = "MechanicalSoup"
browser.submit_selected()
# Display the results
for link in browser.get_current_page().select('a.result__a'):
print(link.text, '->', link.attrs['href'])More examples are available in examples/.
For an example with a more complex form (checkboxes, radio buttons and textareas), read tests/test_browser.py and tests/test_form.py.
Instructions for building, testing and contributing to MechanicalSoup: see CONTRIBUTING.rst.
Read the FAQ.