python mechanize session not saved

Question

I'm trying to use python mechanize to retrive the list of apps on iTunes connect. Once this list is retrieved, further work will be done with those links.

Logging in succeeds but then when i follow the "Manage Your Applications" link I get redirected back to the login page. It is as if the session gets lost.

import mechanize
import cookielib
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
import html2text

filename = 'itunes.html'

br = mechanize.Browser()
cj = cookielib.LWPCookieJar()
br.set_cookiejar(cj)

br.set_handle_equiv(True)
br.set_handle_redirect(True)
br.set_handle_referer(True)
br.set_handle_robots(False)

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

br.addheaders = [('User-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008071615 Fedora/3.0.1-1.fc9 Firefox/3.0.1')]

br.open('https://itunesconnect.apple.com/WebObjects/iTunesConnect.woa')
br.select_form(name='appleConnectForm')
br.form['theAccountName'] = username
br.form['theAccountPW'] = password

br.submit()

apps_link = br.find_link(text='Manage Your Applications')
print "Manage Your Apps link = ", apps_link
req = br.follow_link(text='Manage Your Applications')

for app_link in br.links():
    print "link is ", app_link

Any ideas what could be wrong?

Answer 1

Figured this out after further investigation. This was due to a known bug in cookielib documented here: http://bugs.python.org/issue3924

Basically some sites (notably itunesconnect), set the cookie version as a string not an int. Which causes an error in cookielib since it does not deal with that condition. The fix at the bottom of that issue thread worked for me.

Answer 2

You need to save/load the cookiejar