Python script to download file from button on website

Question

I want to download an xls file by clicking the button "Export to excel" from the following url: https://apps.tampagov.net/CallsForService_Webapp/Default.aspx?type=TPD .

More specifically the button: name = "ctl00$MainContent$btndata". I've already been able to do this using selenium, but, I plan on building a docker image with this script and running as a docker container because this xls is regularly updated and I need the most current data on my local machine and it doesn't make sense to have a browser open that often to fetch this data. I understand there are headless versions of chrome and firefox although I don't believe they support downloads. Also, I understand that web get will not work in this situation because the button is not a static link to the resource. Maybe there's a completely different approach for downloading and updating this data to my computer?

import urllib
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

headers = {
    'Accept':'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=.08',
    'Origin': 'https://www.tampagov.net',
    'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.17 (KHTML, like Gecko)  Chrome/24.0.1312.57 Safari/537.17',
    'Content-Type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded',
    'Referer': 'https://apps.tampagov.net/CallsForService_Webapp/Default.aspx?type=TPD',
    'Accept-Encoding': 'gzip,deflate,br',
    'Accept-Language': 'en-US,en;q=0.5',
}

class MyOpener(urllib.FancyURLopener):
    version = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/24.0.1312.57 Safari/537.17'

myopener = MyOpener()
url = 'https://apps.tampagov.net/CallsForService_Webapp/Default.aspx?type=TPD'
# first HTTP request without form data
f = myopener.open(url)
soup = BeautifulSoup(f, "html.parser")
# parse and retrieve two vital form values
viewstate = soup.select("#__VIEWSTATE")[0]['value']
eventvalidation = soup.select("#__EVENTVALIDATION")[0]['value']

formData = (
    ('__EVENTVALIDATION', eventvalidation),
    ('__VIEWSTATE', viewstate),
    ('Accept', 'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8'),
    ('Accept-Encoding', 'gzip, deflate, br'),
    ('Accept-Language', 'en-US,en;q=0.5'),
    ('Host', 'apps,tampagov.net'),
    ('User-Agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:59.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/59.0'))



payload = urllib.urlencode(formData)
# second HTTP request with form data
r = requests.post("https://apps.tampagov.net/CallsForService_Webapp/Default.aspx?type=TPD", params=payload)
print(r.status_code, r.reason)

Answer 1

Find out the URL you need to fetch as @Sphinx explains, and then simulate it using something similar to:

import urllib.request
import urllib.parse

data = urllib.parse.urlencode({...})
data = data.encode('ascii')

with urllib.request.urlopen("http://...", data) as fd:
    print(fd.read().decode('utf-8'))

Take a look at the documentation of urllib .

Answer 2

First: I removed import urllib because 'requests' is enough.

Some issues you have:

1. You don't need to create one nested tuple then apply urllib.urlencode , uses one dictionary instead that is one reason why requests is so popular.

2. You'd better populate all parameters for the http post request. like below what I did, otherwise, the request may be rejected by the backend.

3. I added one simple codes to save the content to the local.

PS: for those form parameters, you can get their values by analysis the html responsed from http get . Also you can customize the parameters as you need, like page size etc.

Below is a working sample:

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from tqdm import tqdm

def downloadExcel():
    headers = {
        'Accept':'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=.08',
        'Origin': 'https://www.tampagov.net',
        'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.17 (KHTML, like Gecko)  Chrome/24.0.1312.57 Safari/537.17',
        'Content-Type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded',
        'Referer': 'https://apps.tampagov.net/CallsForService_Webapp/Default.aspx?type=TPD',
        'Accept-Encoding': 'gzip,deflate,br',
        'Accept-Language': 'en-US,en;q=0.5',
    }

    r = requests.get("https://apps.tampagov.net/CallsForService_Webapp/Default.aspx?type=TPD", headers=headers)
    # parse and retrieve two vital form values
    if not r.status_code == 200:
        print('Error')
        return
    soup = BeautifulSoup(r.content, "html.parser")
    viewstate = soup.select("#__VIEWSTATE")[0]['value']
    eventvalidation = soup.select("#__EVENTVALIDATION")[0]['value']
    print ('__VIEWSTATE:', viewstate)
    print ('__EVENTVALIDATION:', eventvalidation)
    formData = {
        '__EVENTVALIDATION': eventvalidation,
        '__VIEWSTATE': viewstate,
        '__EVENTTARGET': '',
        '__EVENTARGUMENT': '',
        '__VIEWSTATEGENERATOR': '49DF2C80',
        'MainContent_RadScriptManager1_TSM':""";;System.Web.Extensions, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35:en-US:59e0a739-153b-40bd-883f-4e212fc43305:ea597d4b:b25378d2;Telerik.Web.UI, Version=2015.2.826.40, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=121fae78165ba3d4:en-US:c2ba43dc-851e-4009-beab-3032480b6a4b:16e4e7cd:f7645509:24ee1bba:c128760b:874f8ea2:19620875:4877f69a:f46195d3:92fe8ea0:fa31b949:490a9d4e:bd8f85e4:58366029:ed16cbdc:2003d0b8:88144a7a:1e771326:aa288e2d:b092aa46:7c926187:8674cba1:ef347303:2e42e72a:b7778d6c:c08e9f8a:e330518b:c8618e41:e4f8f289:1a73651d:16d8629e:59462f1:a51ee93e""",
        'search_block_form':'',
        'ctl00$MainContent$btndata':'Export to Excel',
        'ctl00_MainContent_RadWindow1_C_RadGridVehicles_ClientState':'',
        'ctl00_MainContent_RadWindow1_ClientState':'',
        'ctl00_MainContent_RadWindowManager1_ClientState':'',
        'ctl00$MainContent$RadGrid1$ctl00$ctl02$ctl00$PageSizeComboBox':'20',
        'ctl00_MainContent_RadGrid1_ctl00_ctl02_ctl00_PageSizeComboBox_ClientState':'',
        'ctl00$MainContent$RadGrid1$ctl00$ctl02$ctl02$RDIPFdispatch_time':'',
        'ctl00$MainContent$RadGrid1$ctl00$ctl02$ctl02$RDIPFdispatch_time$dateInput':'',
        'ctl00_MainContent_RadGrid1_ctl00_ctl02_ctl02_RDIPFdispatch_time_dateInput_ClientState':'{"enabled":true,"emptyMessage":"","validationText":"","valueAsString":"","minDateStr":"1900-01-01-00-00-00","maxDateStr":"2099-12-31-00-00-00","lastSetTextBoxValue":""}',
        'ctl00_MainContent_RadGrid1_ctl00_ctl02_ctl02_RDIPFdispatch_time_ClientState':'{"minDateStr":"1900-01-01-00-00-00","maxDateStr":"2099-12-31-00-00-00"}',
        'ctl00$MainContent$RadGrid1$ctl00$ctl02$ctl02$RadComboBox1address':'',
        'ctl00_MainContent_RadGrid1_ctl00_ctl02_ctl02_RadComboBox1address_ClientState':'',
        'ctl00$MainContent$RadGrid1$ctl00$ctl02$ctl02$RadComboBox1case_description':'',
        'ctl00_MainContent_RadGrid1_ctl00_ctl02_ctl02_RadComboBox1case_description_ClientState':'',
        'ctl00$MainContent$RadGrid1$ctl00$ctl02$ctl02$FilterTextBox_grid':'',
        'ctl00$MainContent$RadGrid1$ctl00$ctl02$ctl02$RadComboBox1report_number':'',
        'ctl00_MainContent_RadGrid1_ctl00_ctl02_ctl02_RadComboBox1report_number_ClientState':'',
        'ctl00$MainContent$RadGrid1$ctl00$ctl02$ctl02$FilterTextBox_out_max_date':'',
        'ctl00$MainContent$RadGrid1$ctl00$ctl02$ctl02$FilterTextBox_out_rowcount':'',
        'ctl00$MainContent$RadGrid1$ctl00$ctl03$ctl01$PageSizeComboBox':'20',
        'ctl00_MainContent_RadGrid1_ctl00_ctl03_ctl01_PageSizeComboBox_ClientState':'',
        'ctl00_MainContent_RadGrid1_rfltMenu_ClientState':'',
        'ctl00_MainContent_RadGrid1_gdtcSharedTimeView_ClientState':'',
        'ctl00_MainContent_RadGrid1_gdtcSharedCalendar_SD':'[]',
        'ctl00_MainContent_RadGrid1_gdtcSharedCalendar_AD':'[[1900,1,1],[2099,12,31],[2018,3,29]]',
        'ctl00_MainContent_RadGrid1_ClientState':'',
        }

    # second HTTP request with form data
    r = requests.post("https://apps.tampagov.net/CallsForService_Webapp/Default.aspx?type=TPD", data=formData, headers=headers)
    print('received:', r.status_code, len(r.content))
    with open(r"C:\Users\xxx\Desktop\test\test\apps.xls", "wb") as handle:
        for data in tqdm(r.iter_content()):
            handle.write(data)

downloadExcel()