Simon Willison’s Weblog

Python Client Libraries

5th September 2003

Three really useful looking Python modules: ClientForm, ClientTable and ClientCookie. ClientForm looks like it provides similar functionality to the form handling part of the WWW::Mechanize perl module, discussed previously. It essentially provides a very simple interface for loading an HTML page, parsing out the form information then filling in the form and submitting it back to the server. The author recommends it for automated testing (I’ve always had trouble figuring out how to link unit testing in to web applications) but I’m sure it could be useful for screen scraping tools as well. ClientTable is an early beta of a powerful looking table parser, and ClientCookie sits on top of the standard urllib library and transparently persists cookies in between requests.