download robot

[larryzhang]

Hi,
Being a newbie for Python, I am trying to write a code that can act as
a downloading robot.

The website provides information for companies. Manually, I can search
by company name and then click the “download” button to get the data
in excel or word format, before saving the file in a local directory.
The program is to do this automatically.

I have met several problems when writing the codes:
1. The website needs user ID and password, is there a way that I can
pass my ID and password to the server in my python code?
2. Can Python hit the “download” button automatically and choose the
type of file format as I can do manually?
3. The url of each downloading webpage is not unique (webpages point
to different data files may share the same url), which prevent me from
working directly with the url as the address to find a certain file.
Is there any solution for this? Does this mean I have to work directly
with the database stored in the server rather than with the webpage
displayed?

Thank you very much for any comments and suggestions.

Larry