Using BeautifulSoup where authentication is required

Question

I am scraping LAN data using BeautifulSoup4 and Python requests for a company project. Since the site has a login interface, I am not authorized to access the data. The login interface is a pop-up that doesn't allow me to access the page source or inspect the page elements without log in. the error I get is this-

Access Error: Unauthorized Access to this document requires a User ID

This is a screen-shot of the pop-up box (The blackened part is sensitive information). It has not information about the html tags at all, hence I cannot auto-login via python.

I have tried requests_ntlm, selenium, python requests and even ParseHub but it did not work. I have been stuck in this phase for a month now! Please, any help would be appreciated.

Below is my initial code:

import requests
from requests_ntlm import HttpNtlmAuth
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
r = requests.get("www.amazon.in")
from urllib.request import Request, urlopen
req = Request('http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/products/#sortField=oi&sortAsc=false&venues=3&page=1&cleared=1&group=1', headers={'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0'})
webpage = urlopen(req).read()
print r.content
r = requests.get("www.amazon.in",auth=HttpNtlmAuth('user_name','passwd'))
print r.content*

s_data = BeautifulSoup(r.content,"lxml")*
print s_data.content

Error: Document Error: Unauthorized

Access Error: Unauthorized

Access to this document requires a User ID

This is the error I get when BeautifulSoup tries to access the data after I have manually logged into the site.

Solution 1

Have you considered using mechanise?

import mechanize
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import urllib2 
import cookielib

cook = cookielib.CookieJar()
req = mechanize.Browser()
req.set_cookiejar(cook)


req.open("http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/products/#sortField=oi&sortAsc=false&venues=3&page=1&cleared=1&group=1")

req.select_form(nr=0)
req.form['username'] = 'username'
req.form['password'] = 'password.'
req.submit()

print req.response().read()

EDIT

If you come up against robots.txt issues and you have permission to circumvent this then take a look at this answer for techniques to do this https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13303449/urllib2-httperror-http-error-403-forbidden

Solution 2

If you are using BeautifulSoup and requests on Python 3.x, just use this:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests

r = requests.get('URL', auth=('USER_NAME', 'PASSWORD'))
soup = BeautifulSoup(r.content)

Comments

[Siva]

(unable-to-log-in-to-amazon-using-python) [stackoverflow.com/questions/36488023/…

[Pooja Prabhu]

Clarification: The website url I provided is just a sample. I am not allowed to disclose the real one since its a private site.

[Admin]

Using urllib and requests alone won't help much where logins are required. Use requests.Session. If you're unfamiliar with it, see docs.python-requests.org/en/master/user/advanced. Also, open the developer's tab in your browser and study the network window to see what requests are sent by the browser with what query strings and headers. Using User-Agent alone won't suffice in some cases. You'll have to provide a bit more information for us to help further. Perhaps, consider posting the contents of network tab and mask the sensitive information by replacing them with fake one.

[Admin]

Also, BeautifulSoup has nothing to do with the problem you're facing. So consider editing your post to make it clearer.

[Pooja Prabhu]

I tried it. The error I got is this- mechanize._response.httperror_seek_wrapper: HTTP Error 403: request disallowed by robots.txt

[Paula Livingstone]

Hmm ok well if you plan to monetise your work then you have problems scraping this site. How does their robots.txt read?

[Pooja Prabhu]

I am not going to monetize this site. It is for inter-organizational use only. I do not have access to the robots.txt.