Filling Out Web Form Data Using Built-In Python Modules

Question

Alright so I have used mechanize, requests, beautiful soup, and even selenium on my venture to do something like this and I have come to the conclusion that urllib and the other default modules are the best way to go. Only problem is I can't figure out how to use it at all.. So can someone please show me some good places to learn about that specifically? Also I learn best by examples so if someone would convert this to what I am asking for that would be great (also include a submit button lol)

from selenium import webdriver

driver = webdriver.Firefox()

driver.get("http://www.jonessoda.com/contests/back2school")
element = driver.find_element_by_name("fname")
element.send_keys("Ben")

Answer 1

You do want Selenium. It simulates GUI interactions on a browser. When doing things like entering competition form data, this is going to be the way that is least detectable.

A note about selenium: It is not a language-specific library. There are client specific bindings for each language. Most examples and how-to's you'll see are actually written in Java.

A good resource is Selenium-python

Here's your working example. Including submit button.

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC
i = 2 # do it 2 times
while i > 0:
    driver = webdriver.Firefox()
    driver.get("http://www.jonessoda.com/contests/back2school")

    def find_by_xpath(locator):
        element = WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(
            EC.presence_of_element_located((By.XPATH, locator))
        )

        return element

    class FormPage(object):
        def fill_form(self, data):
            find_by_xpath('//input[@name = "fname"]').send_keys(data['fname'])
            find_by_xpath('//input[@name = "lname"]').send_keys(data['lname'])
            find_by_xpath('//input[@name = "email"]').send_keys(data['email'])
            find_by_xpath('//select[@name = "birthday_month"]').send_keys(data['month'])
            find_by_xpath('//select[@name = "birthday_day"]').send_keys(data['day'])
            find_by_xpath('//select[@name = "birthday_year"]').send_keys(data['year'])

            return self # makes it so you can call .submit() after calling this function

        def submit(self):
            find_by_xpath('//input[@value = "Submit"]').click()

    data = {
        'fname': 'Sheep',
        'lname': 'Test',
        'email': '[email protected]',
        'month': 'October',
        'day': '29',
        'year': '1920'
    }

    FormPage().fill_form(data).submit()
    driver.quit() # closes the webbrowser
    i = i - 1