Python - urllib2 & cookielib

Question

I am trying to open the following website and retrieve the initial cookie and use it for the second url-open BUT if you run the following code it outputs 2 different cookies. How do I use the initial cookie for the second url-open?

import cookielib, urllib2  cj = cookielib.CookieJar() opener = urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor(cj))  home = opener.open('https://www.idcourts.us/repository/start.do') print cj  search = opener.open('https://www.idcourts.us/repository/partySearch.do') print cj 

Output shows 2 different cookies every time as you can see:

<cookielib.CookieJar[<Cookie JSESSIONID=0DEEE8331DE7D0DFDC22E860E065085F for www.idcourts.us/repository>]> <cookielib.CookieJar[<Cookie JSESSIONID=E01C2BE8323632A32DA467F8A9B22A51 for www.idcourts.us/repository>]> 

Answer 1

This is not a problem with urllib. That site does some funky stuff. You need to request a couple of stylesheets for it to validate your session id:

import cookielib, urllib2  cj = cookielib.CookieJar() opener = urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor(cj)) # default User-Agent ('Python-urllib/2.6') will *not* work opener.addheaders = [     ('User-Agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.11) Gecko/20101012 Firefox/3.6.11'),     ]   stylesheets = [     'https://www.idcourts.us/repository/css/id_style.css',     'https://www.idcourts.us/repository/css/id_print.css', ]  home = opener.open('https://www.idcourts.us/repository/start.do') print cj sessid = cj._cookies['www.idcourts.us']['/repository']['JSESSIONID'].value # Note the += opener.addheaders += [     ('Referer', 'https://www.idcourts.us/repository/start.do'),     ] for st in stylesheets:     # da trick     opener.open(st+';jsessionid='+sessid) search = opener.open('https://www.idcourts.us/repository/partySearch.do') print cj # perhaps need to keep updating the referer...