What does the set_handle_refresh() method on a Mechanize browser do?

Question

The Mechanize documentation mentions it briefly, but just sets it to False and nothing else. What are the parameters for and what does it actually do?

For example:

br = mechanize.Browser()
br.set_handle_refresh(mechanize._http.HTTPRefreshProcessor(), max_time=1)

Answer 1

It's all about handling "refresh" meta tag behavior.

For example, if a page contains:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5">

the browser would refresh the page every 5 seconds.

And if you want to change the behavior, you would use set_handle_refresh(). E.g. if you want to turn refreshing off:

br.set_handle_refresh(False)

Hope that helps.