Use mechanize to access a HTTP Basic authenticated webpage

Question

In my current program, i'm accessing a HTTP Basic authenticated page like this, which works perfect:

import urllib2
url = 'http://test.localdomain/test.pl'
realm = 'Test DB'
username = 'foo'
password = 'bar'
auth_handler = urllib2.HTTPBasicAuthHandler()
auth_handler.add_password(realm, uri , username, password)
opener = urllib2.build_opener(auth_handler)
data = opener.open(url).read()

Now i want to click a button on that page after logging in. I found the mechanize library for Python which can do things like that easily. Unfortunately, i couldn't successfully do the same basic authentication as above when using mechanize. This is what i tried:

from mechanize import Browser
url = 'http://test.localdomain/test.pl'
realm = 'Test DB'
username = 'foo'
password = 'bar'
browser = Browser()
browser.add_password(url, username, password, realm)
browser.open(url)

But then i get the following exception:

HTTP Error refresh: The HTTP server returned a redirect error that would lead to an     
infinite loop.
The last 30x error message was:
OK

How can i fix this? Or can i let mechanize use the already working authhander created by urllib2 in my first snippet?

Answer 1

My script was throwing the same error. Here's how I fixed it.

browser.add_password(url, username, password, realm)
urllib2.urlopen(url)

You may need to use browser.click()to submit your form if there is one and/or create a "results site" variable and open that with urllib2.

Answer 2

The error can be ignored. When catching it, the program can regularly continue.