Thanks for your help; it brought me quite a bit farther, but not as far as I wanted to come. The authentication is basic authentication, and I have been able to adapt the programs so that I now get my pages correctly.
However, the program uses not only 'GET' operations, but also 'PUT' operations. These are done using httplib rather than urllib, and I cannot see at this point how I can mimick those using urllib2. Andre Engels 2006/3/1, Kent Johnson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > Andre Engels wrote: > > I am active in pywikipediabot, which is programmed in Python and is > > used to edit wikis (based on MediaWiki, such as Wikpedia). It uses > > httplib to connect to the site and get the HTML data. > > > > I now want to use it on another site, but this site is password > > protected (we want to first improve it before releasing it to the > > public). Is it possible with httplib to connect to password protected > > sites (given that I know the login and password of course), and if so, > > how is this done? If not, is there an alternative? > > What kind of authentication is used? Basic and digest authentication > will pop up a dialog in the browser asking for your credentials. The > browser then remembers the credentials and includes them in subsequent > requests. With form-based authentication, a page displays in the browser > with a login form; the web site authenticates and usually sends a cookie > to the browser which must be included in subsequent requests. > > urllib2 has good built-in support for basic and digest authentication of > web sites. For form-based authentication you have to do a bit more work > - install a cookie manager and post to the form yourself. > > See http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/articles/authentication.shtml for > examples of basic auth. Digest auth works pretty much the same way. Make > sure you read to the section "Doing It Properly" - the author likes to > show you the hard way first. > > The article http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/articles/cookielib.shtml > shows how to use cookies, though again the presentation makes it look > harder than it really is, at least in Python 2.4 that has CookieLib > built in. You have to post to the login form yourself, but that is just > another urllib2 request. > > Kent > > _______________________________________________ > Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor > -- Andre Engels, [EMAIL PROTECTED] ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor