Develop Reference

Scraping Data from .ASPX Website URL with Python

I have a static .aspx url that I am trying to scrape. All of my attempts yield the raw html data of the regular website instead of the data I am querying.
My understanding is the headers I am using (which I found from another post) are correct and generalizable:
import urllib.request
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
headers = {
'Accept':'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8',
'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',
'Accept-Encoding': 'gzip,deflate,sdch',
'Accept-Language': 'en-US,en;q=0.8',
'Accept-Charset': 'ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3'
}
class MyOpener(urllib.request.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://www.mytaxcollector.com/trSearch.aspx'
# first HTTP request without form data
f = myopener.open(url)
soup_dummy = BeautifulSoup(f,"html5lib")
# parse and retrieve two vital form values
viewstate = soup_dummy.select("#__VIEWSTATE")[0]['value']
viewstategen = soup_dummy.select("#__VIEWSTATEGENERATOR")[0]['value']
Trying to enter the form data causes nothing to happen:
formData = (
('__VIEWSTATE', viewstate),
('__VIEWSTATEGENERATOR', viewstategen),
('ctl00_contentHolder_trSearchCharactersAPN', '631091430000'),
('__EVENTTARGET', 'ct100$MainContent$calculate')
)
encodedFields = urllib.parse.urlencode(formData)
# second HTTP request with form data
f = myopener.open(url, encodedFields)
soup = BeautifulSoup(f,"html5lib")
trans_emissions = soup.find("span", id="ctl00_MainContent_transEmissions")
print(trans_emissions.text)
This give raw html code almost exactly the same as the "soup_dummy" variable. But what I want to see is the data of the field ('ctl00_contentHolder_trSearchCharactersAPN', '631091430000') being submitted (this is the "parcel number" box.
I would really appreciate the help. If anything, linking me to a good post about HTML requests (one that not only explains but actually walks through scraping aspx) would be great.

To get the result using the parcel number, your parameters have to be somewhat different from what you have already tried with. Moreover, you have to use this url https://www.mytaxcollector.com/trSearchProcess.aspx to send the post requests.
Working code:
from urllib.request import Request, urlopen
from urllib.parse import urlencode
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
url = 'https://www.mytaxcollector.com/trSearchProcess.aspx'
payload = {
'hidRedirect': '',
'hidGotoEstimate': '',
'txtStreetNumber': '',
'txtStreetName': '',
'cboStreetTag': '(Any Street Tag)',
'cboCommunity': '(Any City)',
'txtParcelNumber': '0108301010000', #your search term
'txtPropertyID': '',
'ctl00$contentHolder$cmdSearch': 'Search'
}
data = urlencode(payload)
data = data.encode('ascii')
req = Request(url,data)
req.add_header('User-Agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; ) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/83.0.4103.116 Safari/537.36')
res = urlopen(req)
soup = BeautifulSoup(res.read(),'html.parser')
for items in soup.select("table.propInfoTable tr"):
data = [item.get_text(strip=True) for item in items.select("td")]
print(data)

Python script to download file from button on website

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)

First: I removed import urllib because 'requests' is enough.
Some issues you have:
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.
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.
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()

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.

Scraping .aspx page with python

I am new the web-scraping game. I am trying to scrap the following website:
http://www.foodemissions.com/foodemissions/Calculator.aspx
Using resources found on the Internet, I put together the following HTTP POST request:
import urllib
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
headers = {
'Accept':'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8',
'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',
'Accept-Encoding': 'gzip,deflate,sdch',
'Accept-Language': 'en-US,en;q=0.8',
'Accept-Charset': 'ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3'
}
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 = 'http://www.foodemissions.com/foodemissions/Calculator.aspx'
# first HTTP request without form data
f = myopener.open(url)
soup_dummy = BeautifulSoup(f,"html5lib")
# parse and retrieve two vital form values
viewstate = soup_dummy.select("#__VIEWSTATE")[0]['value']
viewstategen = soup_dummy.select("#__VIEWSTATEGENERATOR")[0]['value']
soup_dummy.find(id="ctl00_MainContent_category")
#search for the string 'input' to find the form data
formData = (
('__VIEWSTATE', viewstate),
('__VIEWSTATEGENERATOR', viewstategen),
('ctl00$MainContent$transport', '200'),
('ctl00$MainContent$quantity','1'),
('ctl00$MainContent$wastepct','100')
)
encodedFields = urllib.urlencode(formData)
# second HTTP request with form data
f = myopener.open(url, encodedFields)
soup = BeautifulSoup(f,"html5lib")
trans_emissions = soup.find("span", id="ctl00_MainContent_transEmissions")
print(trans_emissions.text)
The output from my final print command doesn't seem to change even when I change the ctl00$MainContent$transport element. Any pointers on why this is the case?
Thanks!

You need to make the ASP.NET App "think" that you clicked the calculate button by adding the button name to the __EVENTTARGET hidden input.
formData = (
('__VIEWSTATE', viewstate),
('__VIEWSTATEGENERATOR', viewstategen),
('ctl00$MainContent$transport', '100'),
('ctl00$MainContent$quantity','150'),
('ctl00$MainContent$wastepct','200'),
('__EVENTTARGET', 'ctl00$MainContent$calculate')
)

How to pass arguments for get method with urllib?

The response web page is as below when to slect title and input wordpress.
Here is my python code to pass arguments for get method with python3.
import urllib.request
import urllib.parse
url = 'http://www.it-ebooks.info/'
values = {'q': 'wordpress','type': 'title'}
data = urllib.parse.urlencode(values).encode(encoding='utf-8',errors='ignore')
headers = { 'User-Agent' : 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:50.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/50.0' }
request = urllib.request.Request(url=url, data=data,headers=headers,method='GET')
response = urllib.request.urlopen(request)
buff = response.read()
html = buff.decode("utf8")
print(html)
I can't get the desired output web page.
How to pass arguments for get method with urllib in my example?

The data kwarg of urllib.request.Request is only used for POST requests as it modifies the request's body.
GET requests simply use URL parameters, so you should append these to the url:
params = '?q=wordpress&type=title'
url = 'http://www.it-ebooks.info/search/{}'.format(params)
You can of course take the time and generalize this into a generic function.

is better if you use the library called requests
import requests
headers = {
'DNT': '1',
'Accept-Encoding': 'gzip, deflate, sdch',
'Accept-Language': 'es-ES,es;q=0.8,en;q=0.6',
'Upgrade-Insecure-Requests': '1',
'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/56.0.2924.87 Safari/537.36',
'Accept': 'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8',
'Referer': 'http://www.it-ebooks.info/',
'Connection': 'keep-alive',
}
r = requests.get('http://www.it-ebooks.info/search/?q=wordpress&type=title', headers=headers)
print r.content

Authentication Trouble with Python Requests [duplicate]

i want scrap the PINCODEs from "http://www.indiapost.gov.in/pin/", i am doing with following code written.
import urllib
import urllib2
headers = {
'Accept':'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8',
'Origin': 'http://www.indiapost.gov.in',
'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': 'http://www.indiapost.gov.in/pin/',
'Accept-Encoding': 'gzip,deflate,sdch',
'Accept-Language': 'en-US,en;q=0.8',
'Accept-Charset': 'ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3'
}
viewstate = 'JulXDv576ZUXoVOwThQQj4bDuseXWDCZMP0tt+HYkdHOVPbx++G8yMISvTybsnQlNN76EX/...'
eventvalidation = '8xJw9GG8LMh6A/b6/jOWr970cQCHEj95/6ezvXAqkQ/C1At06MdFIy7+iyzh7813e1/3Elx...'
url = 'http://www.indiapost.gov.in/pin/'
formData = (
('__EVENTVALIDATION', eventvalidation),
('__EVENTTARGET',''),
('__EVENTARGUMENT',''),
('__VIEWSTATE', viewstate),
('__VIEWSTATEENCRYPTED',''),
('__EVENTVALIDATION', eventvalidation),
('txt_offname',''),
('ddl_dist','0'),
('txt_dist_on',''),
('ddl_state','2'),
('btn_state','Search'),
('txt_stateon',''),
('hdn_tabchoice','3')
)
from urllib import FancyURLopener
class MyOpener(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()
encodedFields = urllib.urlencode(formData)
f = myopener.open(url, encodedFields)
print f.info()
try:
fout = open('tmp.txt', 'w')
except:
print('Could not open output file\n')
fout.writelines(f.readlines())
fout.close()
i am getting response from server as "Sorry this site has encountered a serious problem, please try reloading the page or contact webmaster."
pl suggest where i am going wrong..

Where did you get the value viewstate and eventvalidation? On one hand, they shouldn't end with "...", you must have omitted something. On the other hand, they shouldn't be hard-coded.
One solution is like this:
Retrieve the page via URL "http://www.indiapost.gov.in/pin/" without any form data
Parse and retrieve the form values like __VIEWSTATE and __EVENTVALIDATION (you may take use of BeautifulSoup).
Get the search result(second HTTP request) by adding vital form-data from step 2.
UPDATE:
According to the above idea, I modify your code slightly to make it work:
import urllib
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
headers = {
'Accept':'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8',
'Origin': 'http://www.indiapost.gov.in',
'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': 'http://www.indiapost.gov.in/pin/',
'Accept-Encoding': 'gzip,deflate,sdch',
'Accept-Language': 'en-US,en;q=0.8',
'Accept-Charset': 'ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3'
}
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 = 'http://www.indiapost.gov.in/pin/'
# first HTTP request without form data
f = myopener.open(url)
soup = BeautifulSoup(f)
# parse and retrieve two vital form values
viewstate = soup.select("#__VIEWSTATE")[0]['value']
eventvalidation = soup.select("#__EVENTVALIDATION")[0]['value']
formData = (
('__EVENTVALIDATION', eventvalidation),
('__VIEWSTATE', viewstate),
('__VIEWSTATEENCRYPTED',''),
('txt_offname', ''),
('ddl_dist', '0'),
('txt_dist_on', ''),
('ddl_state','1'),
('btn_state', 'Search'),
('txt_stateon', ''),
('hdn_tabchoice', '1'),
('search_on', 'Search'),
)
encodedFields = urllib.urlencode(formData)
# second HTTP request with form data
f = myopener.open(url, encodedFields)
try:
# actually we'd better use BeautifulSoup once again to
# retrieve results(instead of writing out the whole HTML file)
# Besides, since the result is split into multipages,
# we need send more HTTP requests
fout = open('tmp.html', 'w')
except:
print('Could not open output file\n')
fout.writelines(f.readlines())
fout.close()