How to access a web site with an authentication template.

Anthra Norell anthra.norell at bluewin.ch
Wed Mar 17 14:43:00 EDT 2010 

Hi all,

   I have spent the better part of this day reading docs and googling 
archives to no avail. About this: I understand that I can access 
password protected sites with urllib2. However, the protocol seems to 
be: I try without password and catch the error coming back. The header 
will then tell me what the server expects in the line of formats. That 
doesn't work with a site I am dealing with, because the opening page 
does not require a password. It presents an id/password entry template 
and I have no clue how to respond in python. The page source is chock 
full of java script. The header--if that means anything--is:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" 
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang = "en-us">

<head id="ctl00_Head1"><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" 
content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<link id="ctl00_glbalLayoutCSS" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" 
href="/cve/p/6/Default/Styles/global_layout.css" />
... more CSS
<!--  Site level default.  The only time a firm.css is required is for 
segment variations.  -->

I don't expect solutions, but rather pointers to relevant reading.

Thanks

Frederic

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