How to simulate clicking a link

[dbphydb]

Hi,

Im basically from QA. I have a piece of code in python that parses HTML pages to reach to a specific link on a webpage. The below code gets me the url of the link which needs to be clicked. What code should i write to simulate clicking a link.

URL = "http://11.12.13.27:8080/cruisecontrol"
BRANCH_FILE = "b.txt"

from urllib2 import urlopen
from HTMLParser import HTMLParser

import re
destination_re = re.compile(r"Test 5")

def read_branch():
    return open(BRANCH_FILE).read().strip()

def get_links(url):
    parser = MyHTMLParser()
    parser.feed(urlopen(url).read())
    parser.close()
    return parser.links

# Build url for Deploy page
def get_deploy_url():
    branch = read_branch().lower()
    url = URL + "/buildresults/abc_%s_nightly_build" % branch
    for link in get_links(url):
        if link["href"].startswith("Deploy"):
            return "%s/%s" % (URL, link["href"])

# Build url for Destination page
def get_destination_url():
    url = get_deploy_url()
    print url
    for link in get_links(url):
        if destination_re.search(link["href"]):
            return "http://11.12.13.27:8080/cruisecontrol/" + link["href"]


class MyHTMLParser(HTMLParser):
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwd):
        HTMLParser.__init__(self, *args, **kwd)
        self.links = []

    def handle_starttag(self, tag, attrs):
        if tag == "a":
            attrs = dict(attrs)
            if "href" in attrs:
                self.links.append(dict(attrs))

    def handle_endtag(self, tag):
        pass

if __name__ == "__main__":
    final_url = get_destination_url()
    if final_url is None:
        print "Could not find a destination to deploy"
    else:
        print final_url

Below is the output i get
http://11.12.13.27:808 0/cruisecontrol/DeploySelect.js p?ArtifactsUrl= artifacts/abc_b_nightly_b uild/20100506124231

http://11.12.13.27:808 0/cruisecontrol/DeployConfig.js p?name=Test 5&scriptPath=xx xxxxxxxxx


Actually i have a need to simulate clicking Test 5 link on the deployment webpage url. Please help.

[Glenton]

When I've done this in the past, I've simply extracted the link command and sent that.

For example, there was a form which searched for data on particular shares. The UI was that you'd type a code into a box and press a button. But looking at the page source revealed that the button took the data from the text box, appended it to a .asp command and went to that website.

So my code just did this

url='http://www.sharedata.co.za/findshare.asp?SearchString='+share
req=urllib2.Request(url)

Of course, in principle, you could find the action that the button does (with a regular expression or something) and make that your variable, and "press" the button by then going to the relevant link. That's typically all that's happening behind the scenes anyway...