Automatizing web browser form filling in Python

Question

Question:

Hi. I am a beginner trying to learn Python, and for one of my first projects I want to write a script that will fill out a survey automatically for me. I am familiar with coding, and I have most of the code written to solve this problem. What I am struggling is to write a method that will hit button #1 in question #1, or that will push any given button. One way I've realized I can do this, is perhaps by writing a script to press tab-> up-> down-> tab-> up -> down in the order needed to answer all of the questions.

Here is an image of what the survey looks like (CSS was disable for clarity). http://i.imgur.com/Tn94KFA.jpg

What is one way to go about writing a method to push a radio button?

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[Disclaimer]: I have checked out the following questions but they were of no use to me in my current situation:

• fill out a webform that uses javascript with python (question was framed very strangely and was about Javascript forums, which I don't understand how it is relevant/ I didn't understand it, and nobody answered the question).
• Script to take web survey for me (answers were only about Java, however something like this tool called HtmlUnit seems cool, if there were a comparable library in Python).
• How to fill out form data on a website (question is about Java).

Answer 1

There are Python libraries and tools for automatizing browser actions. StackOverflow.com is not a place to ask for an recommendation for such a tool and thus moderators will close this question (SO is usually asking a help for particular problem, not for broad help and tutoriing requests). However here are some starting points for you

• Splinter - automate browser actions in Python

• Mechanize - Python library for stateful programmatic web browsing

• Selenium automizing framework Python bindings - using full installed browser

• Headless web browsing listing - includes Python ones

• Scrapy - web content scraping framework in Python

For installing Python packages please refer to official package installation tutorial.