Navigating a website in python, scraping, and posting

Question

There are many good resources already on stackoverflow but I'm still having an issue. I've visited these sources:

• how to submit query to .aspx page in python
• Submitting a post request to an aspx page
• Scrapping aspx webpage with Python using BeautifulSoup
• http://www.pythonforbeginners.com/cheatsheet/python-mechanize-cheat-sheet

I'm attempting to visit http://www.latax.state.la.us/Menu_ParishTaxRolls/TaxRolls.aspx and select a Parish. I believe this forces a post and allows me to select a year, which posts again, and allows for yet more selection. I've written my script a few different ways following the above sources and haven't successfully been able to submit the site to allow me to enter a year.

My current code

import urllib
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import mechanize

headers = [
    ('Accept','text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8'),
    ('Origin', 'http://www.indiapost.gov.in'),
    ('User-Agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.17 (KHTML, like Gecko)  Chrome/24.0.1312.57 Safari/537.17'),
    ('Content-Type', 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded'),
    ('Referer', 'http://www.latax.state.la.us/Menu_ParishTaxRolls/TaxRolls.aspx'),
    ('Accept-Encoding', 'gzip,deflate,sdch'),
    ('Accept-Language', 'en-US,en;q=0.8'),
]

br = mechanize.Browser()
br.addheaders = headers

url = 'http://www.latax.state.la.us/Menu_ParishTaxRolls/TaxRolls.aspx'

response = br.open(url)
# first HTTP request without form data
soup = BeautifulSoup(response)
# parse and retrieve two vital form values
viewstate = soup.findAll("input", {"type": "hidden", "name": "__VIEWSTATE"})
eventvalidation = soup.findAll("input", {"type": "hidden", "name": "__EVENTVALIDATION"})

formData = (
    ('__EVENTVALIDATION', eventvalidation[0]['value']),
    ('__VIEWSTATE', viewstate[0]['value']),
    ('__VIEWSTATEENCRYPTED',''),

)



try:
    fout = open('C:\\GIS\\tmp.htm', 'w')
except:
    print('Could not open output file\n')

fout.writelines(response.readlines())
fout.close()

I've also attempted this in the shell and what I entered plus what I received (modified to cut down on the bulk) can be found http://pastebin.com/KAW5VtXp

Anyway I try to change the value in the Parish dropdown list and post I get taken to a webmaster login page.

Am I approaching this the correct way? Any thoughts would be extremely helpful.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I ended up using selenium.

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys

driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.get("http://www.latax.state.la.us/Menu_ParishTaxRolls/TaxRolls.aspx")
elem = driver.find_element_by_name("ctl00$ContentPlaceHolderMain$ddParish")
elem.send_keys("TERREBONNE PARISH")
elem.send_keys(Keys.RETURN)

elem = driver.find_element_by_name("ctl00$ContentPlaceHolderMain$ddYear")
elem.send_keys("2013")
elem.send_keys(Keys.RETURN)

elem = driver.find_element_by_id("ctl00_ContentPlaceHolderMain_rbSearchField_1")
elem.click()

APN = 'APN # here'
elem = driver.find_element_by_name("ctl00$ContentPlaceHolderMain$txtSearch")
elem.send_keys(APN)
elem.send_keys(Keys.RETURN)

# Access the PDF
elem = driver.find_element_by_link_text('Generate Report')
elem.click()
elements = driver.find_elements_by_tag_name('a')
elements[1].click()