How to change automatically html <input> tags using python?

Question

Problem.
I have a real html page, which could be parsed by beautifulsoup (or something else) if needed.
I have some identical input tags on this page. Say, a 1000 input tags that look like:

<input class=​"text_class​" type=​"text" size=​"3" value=​"20">​

And on the end of the page I have submit-type input tag that looks like this:

<input class=​"submit_class" type=​"submit" value=​"Submit">​

The question is how could I change the values of my 1000 tags to be, lets say, 30, not 20 and submit all the changes using final submit-tag. All I need is a human-like behavior on the page on a big amount of data performed by python script. I suspect that maybe some special python library would be helpful in this case.
Thanks in advance for any help or pointing directions to look at!

Answer 1

You have several options to change the input values and submit a form:

• mechanize
• selenium
• Ghost.py

Note that Selenium and Ghost.py use a real browser. Mechanize is the easiest way to go in your case, just note that it may not work for you if there is a lot of javascript involved in the form initializing or submitting process.