I'm scraping an old ASP.net website using Python's requests module.
I've spent 5+ hours trying to figure out how to simulate this POST request to no avail. Doing it the way I do it below, I essentially get a message saying "No item matches this item reference."
Any help would be deeply appreciated – here's the request and my code, a few things are modified out of respect to brevity and/or privacy:
My own code:
import requests
# Scraping the item number from the website, I have confirmed this is working.
#Then use the newly acquired item number to request the data.
item_url = http://www.example.com/EN/items/Pages/yourrates.aspx?vr= + item_number[0]
viewstate = r'/wEPD...' # Truncated for brevity.
# Create the appropriate request and payload.
payload = {"vr": int(item_number[0])}
item_request_body = {
"__SPSCEditMenu": "true",
"MSOWebPartPage_PostbackSource": "",
"MSOTlPn_SelectedWpId": "",
"MSOTlPn_View": 0,
"MSOTlPn_ShowSettings": "False",
"MSOGallery_SelectedLibrary": "",
"MSOGallery_FilterString": "",
"MSOTlPn_Button": "none",
"__EVENTTARGET": "",
"__EVENTARGUMENT": "",
"MSOAuthoringConsole_FormContext": "",
"MSOAC_EditDuringWorkflow": "",
"MSOSPWebPartManager_DisplayModeName": "Browse",
"MSOWebPartPage_Shared": "",
"MSOLayout_LayoutChanges": "",
"MSOLayout_InDesignMode": "",
"MSOSPWebPartManager_OldDisplayModeName": "Browse",
"MSOSPWebPartManager_StartWebPartEditingName": "false",
"__VIEWSTATE": viewstate,
"keywords": "Search our site",
"__CALLBACKID": "ctl00$SPWebPartManager1$g_dbb9e9c7_fe1d_46df_8789_99a6c9db4b22",
"__CALLBACKPARAM": "startvr"
}
# Write the appropriate headers for the property information.
item_request_headers = {
"Host": home_site,
"Connection": "keep-alive",
"Content-Length": len(encoded_valuation_request),
"Cache-Control": "max-age=0",
"Origin": home_site,
"User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/36.0.1985.125 Safari/537.36",
"Content-Type": "application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8",
"Cookie": "__utma=48409910.1174413745.1405662151.1406402487.1406407024.17; __utmb=48409910.7.10.1406407024; __utmc=48409910; __utmz=48409910.1406178827.13.3.utmcsr=ratesandvallandingpage|utmccn=landingpages|utmcmd=button",
"Accept": "*/*",
"Referer": valuation_url,
"Accept-Encoding": "gzip,deflate,sdch",
"Accept-Language": "en-US,en;q=0.8"
}
response = requests.post(url=item_url, params=payload, data=item_request_body, headers=item_request_headers)
print response.text
What Chrome is telling me the request looks like:
Remote Address:202.55.96.131:80
Request URL:http://www.example.com/EN/items/Pages/yourrates.aspx?vr=123456789
Request Method:POST
Status Code:200 OK
Request Headers
Accept:*/*
Accept-Encoding:gzip,deflate,sdch
Accept-Language:en-US,en;q=0.8
Cache-Control:max-age=0
Connection:keep-alive
Content-Length:21501
Content-Type:application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8
Cookie:__utma=48409910.1174413745.1405662151.1406402487.1406407024.17; __utmb=48409910.7.10.1406407024; __utmc=48409910; __utmz=48409910.1406178827.13.3.utmcsr=ratesandvallandingpage|utmccn=landingpages|utmcmd=button
Host:www.site.com
Origin:www.site.com
Referer:http://www.example.com/EN/items/Pages/yourrates.aspx?vr=123456789
User-Agent:Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/36.0.1985.125 Safari/537.36
Query String Parameters
vr:123456789
Form Data
__SPSCEditMenu:true
MSOWebPartPage_PostbackSource:
MSOTlPn_SelectedWpId:
MSOTlPn_View:0
MSOTlPn_ShowSettings:False
MSOGallery_SelectedLibrary:
MSOGallery_FilterString:
MSOTlPn_Button:none
__EVENTTARGET:
__EVENTARGUMENT:
MSOAuthoringConsole_FormContext:
MSOAC_EditDuringWorkflow:
MSOSPWebPartManager_DisplayModeName:Browse
MSOWebPartPage_Shared:
MSOLayout_LayoutChanges:
MSOLayout_InDesignMode:
MSOSPWebPartManager_OldDisplayModeName:Browse
MSOSPWebPartManager_StartWebPartEditingName:false
__VIEWSTATE:/wEPD...(Omitted for length)
keywords:Search our site
__CALLBACKID:ctl00$SPWebPartManager1$g_dbb9e9c7_fe1d_46df_8789_99a6c9db4b22
__CALLBACKPARAM:startvr
You have too many request parameters, and should not set the content-type, content-length, host, origin, or connection headers; leave those to requests
to set.
You are also doubling up the url parameters; either add the vr
parameter to the URL manually or use params
, not do both.
It may well be that some of the parameters in the POST body are generated by the ASP application tied to a session. I'd use a GET request with a Session object the valuation_url
, parse the form in that page to extract the __CALLBACKID
parameter. The requests Session will then store any cookies the server sets and reuse those:
item_request_headers = {
"User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/36.0.1985.125 Safari/537.36",
"Accept": "*/*",
"Accept-Encoding": "gzip,deflate,sdch",
"Accept-Language": "en-US,en;q=0.8"
}
payload = {"vr": int(item_number[0])}
session = requests.Session(headers=item_request_headers)
# Get form page
form_response = session.get(validation_url, params=payload)
# parse form page; BeautifulSoup could do this for example
soup = BeautifulSoup(form_response.content)
callbackid = soup.select('input[name=__CALLBACKID]')[0]['value']
item_request_body = {
"__SPSCEditMenu": "true",
"MSOWebPartPage_PostbackSource": "",
"MSOTlPn_SelectedWpId": "",
"MSOTlPn_View": 0,
"MSOTlPn_ShowSettings": "False",
"MSOGallery_SelectedLibrary": "",
"MSOGallery_FilterString": "",
"MSOTlPn_Button": "none",
"__EVENTTARGET": "",
"__EVENTARGUMENT": "",
"MSOAuthoringConsole_FormContext": "",
"MSOAC_EditDuringWorkflow": "",
"MSOSPWebPartManager_DisplayModeName": "Browse",
"MSOWebPartPage_Shared": "",
"MSOLayout_LayoutChanges": "",
"MSOLayout_InDesignMode": "",
"MSOSPWebPartManager_OldDisplayModeName": "Browse",
"MSOSPWebPartManager_StartWebPartEditingName": "false",
"__VIEWSTATE": viewstate,
"keywords": "Search our site",
"__CALLBACKID": callbackid,
"__CALLBACKPARAM": "startvr"
}
item_url = 'http://www.example.com/EN/items/Pages/yourrates.aspx'
response = session.post(url=item_url, params=payload, data=item_request_body,
headers={'Referer': form_response.url})
The session handles the headers (setting a user agent, and accept parameters), only on the POST with the session do we add a referrer header as well.
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