BrowserPlus is an extension of the mechanize Browser and utilises lxml to provide simple methods to select elements from the current page.

To install BrowserPlus, in the command line, run:

pip install browserplus

Once you have a copy of BrowserPlus, you can import the package and create an instance using:

from browserplus import BrowserPlus
bp = BrowserPlus()

bp.open('http://google.com')

#print the source code of the current page in a pretty format
bp.show()

If the current web page has the link <a href="/login">Login</a>, you can click on the link using:

bp.go('Login')

Say we had the following form which we wanted to fill out and submit:

<form method="post" action="login" id="login_form" name="login_form">
    <input name="username" type="text" />
    <input name="password" type="text" />
    <input name="login_button" type="submit" />
</form>

You can use select_form_by() to select the form using unique defining attributes such as id, name, action, etc.

#you could do this:
bp.select_form_by('id', 'login_form')
#or this:
bp.select_form_by('name', 'login_form')
#or this:
bp.select_form_by('action', 'login')

Once the form has been selected, you can set the form values using the names of the input.

bp['username'] = 'admin'
bp['password'] = 'abc123'

Once you've entered in your desired details, you can submit the form using:

bp.submit()

Sometimes you might have multiple submit buttons, for example:

<input type="submit" value="Save"></input>
<input type="submit" value="Preview"></input>

In that case you could use:

bp.submit(label="Save") #or Preview if you wanted that one

Sometimes we may want to know whether or not the current web page contains certain text such as error messages or the like. This can be done using the has() method.

#ensure login was successful
msg = 'Login successful'
assert(bp.has(msg)) 

Say we had the following HTML which we wanted to extract text or attributes from:

<div class="content">
    <h1 title="hello hello">Generic Title</h1>
</div>

You could do the following:

#to get the text inside the h1 element
header = bp.find('div.content h1')
header_text = header.text #Generic Title

#and to get the contents of the title attribute
header_title = header.attrib['title'] #hello hello

Since BrowserPlus combines Mechanize and lxml, to better utilise BrowserPlus you may find the following links useful.

• mechanize
• lxml