Python to Automate Internet Tasks?

[Fexter]

I want to use Python to automate tasks on the internet, such as getting information from a website, multiplying a number by it, then putting this number back into the page. However, I haven't been able to find anything saying how to do this, other than downloading an extra program for it.

Is it possible to do this without downloading a new program, or is it not possible in the current versions of Python? If it is possible to do it, could someone post where I could find out how to do this, or post some of the code used to do this?

Thanks,
Fexter

[Tony]

sounds like you are looking for httplib http://docs.python.org/library/httplib.html

[Fexter]

@Tony
Okay, thank you.

[Zren]

If you're not scared at installing or using a library, check out Mechanize and BeautifulSoup. The first is essentially httplib with an upgrade, with built in presets emulating a browser. The latter is extremely useful for breaking up HTML into python syntax.

Mechanize: http://wwwsearch.sourceforge.net/mechanize/
BeautifulSoup: Homepage | Examples

Simple Demo of the two:

Python:

from mechanize import Browser from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup url = 'http://google.com' mech = Browser() page = mech.open(url) print "Opened: %s" % url html = page.read() soup = BeautifulSoup(html) tags = soup.findAll('input') for tag in tags:     try:         name = tag['name']     except KeyError:         name = ''     try:         type = tag['type']     except KeyError:         type = 'None'         print "Input(Name: %-12s | Type: %-12s)" % (name, type)

[SNIPERDUDE]

Those two libraries make me love Python all the more. I'll check them out tonight