MechanicalSoup
A Python library for automating interaction with websites. MechanicalSoup automatically stores and sends cookies, follows redirects, and can follow links and submit forms. It doesn't do JavaScript.
MechanicalSoup was created by M Hickford, who was a fond user of the Mechanize library. Unfortunately, Mechanize is incompatible with Python 3 and its development stalled for several years. MechanicalSoup provides a similar API, built on Python giants Requests (for HTTP sessions) and BeautifulSoup (for document navigation). Since 2017 it is a project actively maintained by a small team including @hemberger and @moy.
Installation
|Latest Version| |Supported Versions|
PyPy and PyPy3 are also supported (and tested against).
Download and install the latest released version from PyPI <https://pypi.python.org/pypi/MechanicalSoup/>
__::
pip install MechanicalSoup
Download and install the development version from GitHub <https://github.com/MechanicalSoup/MechanicalSoup>
__::
pip install git+https://github.com/MechanicalSoup/MechanicalSoup
Installing from source (installs the version in the current working directory)::
python setup.py install
(In all cases, add --user
to the install
command to
install in the current user's home directory.)
Example
From <examples/expl_duck_duck_go.py>
__, code to get the results from
a DuckDuckGo search:
.. code:: python
"""Example usage of MechanicalSoup to get the results from
DuckDuckGo."""
import mechanicalsoup
# Connect to duckduckgo
browser = mechanicalsoup.StatefulBrowser()
browser.open("https://duckduckgo.com/")
# Fill-in the search form
browser.select_form('#search_form_homepage')
browser["q"] = "MechanicalSoup"
browser.submit_selected()
# Display the results
for link in browser.get_current_page().select('a.result__a'):
print(link.text, '->', link.attrs['href'])
More examples are available in <examples/>
__.
For an example with a more complex form (checkboxes, radio buttons and
textareas), read <tests/test_browser.py>
__
and <tests/test_form.py>
__.
Development
|Build Status| |Coverage Status|
|Requirements Status| |Documentation Status|
|CII Best Practices|
Instructions for building, testing and contributing to MechanicalSoup:
see <CONTRIBUTING.rst>
__.