Twill/Mechanize access to html content

Question

Couple of questions regarding Twill and Mechanize:

1. Is Twill still relevant as a web-automation tool? If yes, then why is not currently maintained? If no, has Mechanize matured further to support Twill-style simple scripting? Or is there another package that has stepped up to fill the gap?

2. I was able to very quickly setup a couple of test suites in python using Twill, but I'm a little confused on how to access the information that Twill spits out in my python program. That is, I can do showforms() and see the form values neatly listed and I can use fv to update the form values and submit. But how do I access one of those form values as a python var? How can I say something like: someField1Value = fv("1","someField1")

Answer 1

Twill is a thin shell around the mechanize package. You are right it does not appear to be actively maintained so I would stick with Mechanize.

However Mechanize does not support the simple interface you are after. For that I would recommend Chickenfoot.