Python 3, urllib POST submit

Question

I'd like to write a Python script to auto login to my broadband usage meter account. I've never done a POST submit before and I'm having some trouble with it.

import urllib.request, urllib.parse, urllib.error
import socket

try:
    details = urllib.parse.urlencode({ 'IDToken1': 'USERNAME', 'IDToken2': 'PASSWORD' })
    url = urllib.request.Request('https://login1.telecom.co.nz/distauth/UI/Login?realm=XtraUsers&goto=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.telecom.co.nz%3A443%2Fjetstreamum%2FxtraSum%3Flink%3Drdt', details)
    url.add_header("User-Agent","Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.29 Safari/525.13")

    responseData = urllib.request.urlopen(url).read().decode('utf8', 'ignore')
    responseFail = False

except urllib.error.HTTPError as e:
    responseData = e.read().decode('utf8', 'ignore')
    responseFail = False

except urllib.error.URLError:
    responseFail = True

except socket.error:
    responseFail = True

except socket.timeout:
    responseFail = True

except UnicodeEncodeError:
    print("[x]  Encoding Error")
    responseFail = True

print(responseData)

From the HTML I derived that IDToken1 is the username id and IDToken2 is the password id.

Here is my problem:

• When I enter the correct username and password, the login page loads, but:

• When I enter the incorrect username or password, I get a page that says:

  This server has encountered an internal error which prevents it from fulfilling your request. The most likely cause is a misconfiguration. Please ask the administrator to look for messages in the server's error log.

Dewayne

Well, this is very difficult without seeing the actual page you are using... maybe you should check what is actually sent by your browser with the Chrome dev tools or a packet sniffer like Wireshark? – Rachele

Answer 1

details = urllib.parse.urlencode({'IDToken1': 'USERNAME', 'IDToken2': 'PASSWORD'})

Add the following line:

details = details.encode('UTF-8')

Ivanna

Answer 2

That could be by design. What happens if you do it in a browser? The fact that it works with correct data means that you're doing it right.

Cassiecassil