Cookie Problem in Python

Question

I'm working on a simple HTML scraper for Hulu in python 2.6 and am having problems with logging on to my account. Here's my code so far:

import urllib
import urllib2
from cookielib import CookieJar
#make a cookie and redirect handlers
cookies = CookieJar() 
cookie_handler= urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor(cookies)
redirect_handler= urllib2.HTTPRedirectHandler()

opener = urllib2.build_opener(redirect_handler,cookie_handler)#make opener w/ handlers

#build the url
login_info = {'username':USER,'password':PASS}#USER and PASS are defined
data = urllib.urlencode(login_info)

req = urllib2.Request("http://www.hulu.com/account/authenticate",data)#make the request
test = opener.open(req) #open the page
print test.read() #print html results

The code compiles and runs, but all that prints is:

Login.onError("Please \074a href=\"/support/login_faq#cant_login\"\076enable cookies\074/a\076 and try again.");

I assume there is some error in how I'm handling cookies, but just can't seem to spot it. I've heard Mechanize is a very useful module for this type of program, but as this seems to be the only speed bump left, I was hoping to find my bug.

Answer 1

What you're seeing is a ajax return. It is probably using javascript to set the cookie, and screwing up your attempts to authenticate.