How to get cookies from web-browser with Python?

Question

Context:
I am working on a backend access to an OpenID consumer (StackExchange in fact). If I am to provide all possible OpenID providers as an option to the user, then I'd have to simulate browser interaction to authenticate to each of these providers before I could submit the Open ID URL. However, I think I could cut this short by accessing the existing cookies of the user's web-browser, and requesting authentication to the consumer directly with the URL.

Problem:
How to access the user's web-browser's cookies? I've seen very little information on how to do it with Python. This previous question partly answers the problem regarding Firefox, pointing especially to the code sample her below. However, I would need to access cookies from the most common web browsers used on Linux, not just Firefox.

#! /usr/bin/env python
# Protocol implementation for handling gsocmentors.com transactions
# Author: Noah Fontes nfontes AT cynigram DOT com
# License: MIT

def sqlite2cookie(filename):
    from cStringIO import StringIO
    from pysqlite2 import dbapi2 as sqlite

    con = sqlite.connect(filename)

    cur = con.cursor()
    cur.execute("select host, path, isSecure, expiry, name, value from moz_cookies")

    ftstr = ["FALSE","TRUE"]

    s = StringIO()
    s.write("""\
# Netscape HTTP Cookie File
# http://www.netscape.com/newsref/std/cookie_spec.html
# This is a generated file!  Do not edit.
""")
    for item in cur.fetchall():
        s.write("%s\t%s\t%s\t%s\t%s\t%s\t%s\n" % (
            item[0], ftstr[item[0].startswith('.')], item[1],
            ftstr[item[2]], item[3], item[4], item[5]))

    s.seek(0)

    cookie_jar = cookielib.MozillaCookieJar()
    cookie_jar._really_load(s, '', True, True)
    return cookie_jar

Question: Does Python provide a module that can facilitate cookie extraction from web-browsers? Otherwise, how should I adapt the above code to draw cookies from other browsers, like Chromium etc.?

PS: Or am I looking at the initial problem (i.e. authenticate to the OpenID provider) the wrong way? (I feel I am just replacing a problem by another.)

Solution

I created a module to do exactly that, available here: https://bitbucket.org/richardpenman/browsercookie/

Example usage:

import requests
import browsercookie
cj = browsercookie.chrome()
r = requests.get('http://stackoverflow.com', cookies=cj)

python3 fork: https://github.com/borisbabic/browser_cookie3