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pythonpython-3.xpython-requestsurllib

Grabbing the value of a HTML form input field?

There's a web page similar to: www.example.com/form.php

I want to use Python to grab one of the values from the HTML form on the page. For example, if the form had I could get the value "test" returned

I have googled this extensively but most relate to posting form data, or have advice to use Django or cgi-bin. I don't have access to the server directly so I can't do that.

I thought the library REQUESTS could do it but I can't see it in the documentation.

HTML:

<html>
<body>
<form method="" action="formpost.php" name="form1" id="form1">
<input type="text" name"field1" value="this is field1">
<input type="hidden" name="key" value="secret key field">
</form>
</body>

As an example, I'd like something like this in Python:

import special_library

html = special_library.get("http://www.example.com/form.php")
print html.get_field("wanted")

Has anyone got any suggestions to achieve this? Or any libraries I may not have thought of or been aware of?

Solution

  • You can use requests library, and lxml

    Try this: 

    import requests
from lxml import html

s = requests.Session()
resp = s.get("http://www.example.com/form.php")
doc = html.fromstring(resp.text)

wanted_value = doc.xpath("//input[@class='wanted_class_name']/@value")
print(wanted_value)

    You can check following resources: