I have never used mechanize but I have used urllib to write a script that logs into a router to start or stop a backup connection. I needed to experiment a bit to get it to work, but it turned out to be pretty trivial.
All the work to handle HTTP authentication is done in urllib.FancyURLopener. By default it prompts the user to enter the necessary username and password. I subclassed it to hardcode both. Then I just had had to submit one form by the 'POST' method to get the router to do what I wanted. Here is the guts of the code ...
import os, sys, urllib
url = 'http://192.168.0.1/'
urlpage = 'http://192.168.0.1/st_sp.htm'
username = 'router username'
password = 'router password'
connect = {'dial' : 'Connect'}
disconnect = {'hang_Up' : 'Disconnect'}
class myopener(urllib.FancyURLopener):
def __init__(self, *args):
urllib.FancyURLopener.__init__(self, *args)
def prompt_user_passwd(self, host, realm): # override prompt routine to hard-code user name and password
return (username, password)
def do_form_action(action):
urllib._urlopener = myopener() # handles standard HTTP authentication dialogue
data = urllib.urlencode(action) # encodes form data - action is a dictionary of values to append to the end of the url in response to the POST method
urllib.urlopen(urlpage, data) # open page using POST method and submit form data
To start the backup connection I call do_form_action(connect). To stop the backup conenction I call do_form_action(disconnect)
