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Does mechanization not see any hidden input?

I want to clear this webpage using Mechanize. The form element is as follows:

<form name="ctl00" method="post" action="PSearchResults.aspx?state=ME&amp;rp=" id="ctl00"> <div> <input type="hidden" name="__EVENTTARGET" id="__EVENTTARGET" value="" /> <input type="hidden" name="__EVENTARGUMENT" id="__EVENTARGUMENT" value="" /> <input type="hidden" name="__VIEWSTATE" id="__VIEWSTATE" value="verylongstring" /> </div> <input type="hidden" name="__EVENTVALIDATION" id="__EVENTVALIDATION" value="/wEWAgKb7POZAwK4v7ffCOmari00yJft/iuZBMdOH/zh9TDI" /> </div> </form>

I use Mechanize to print controls, but it can only see two of them. If I run this:

  br.select_form(name='ctl00') br.form.set_all_readonly(False) # allow changing the .value of all controls for control in br.form.controls: if not control.name: print " - (type) =", (control.type) continue print " - (name, type, value) =", (control.name, control.type, br[control.name])

all that is printed is the following:

 - (name, type, value) = ('__VIEWSTATE', 'hidden', '/wEPDwUGNDQ5NTMwD2QWAgIBD2QWAgIHD2QWCgIBDw8WAh4E...more - (name, type, value) = ('__EVENTVALIDATION', 'hidden', '/wEWAgKb7POZAwK4v7ffCOmari00yJft/iuZBMdOH/zh9TDI')

Why can't the mechanism "see" the __EVENTTARGET and __EVENTARGUMENT fields?

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2 answers

The site checks useragent and serves on another page for mechanization

specifying this as useragent seems to work fine

 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6

Here is a link showing how to install User-Agent using mechanization

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As a continuation, I had the same problem using mechanize (python) and I tried to define a UserAgent for

 br.addheaders = [('User-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.2; WOW64) AppleWebKit/536.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/20.0.1132.47 Safari/536.11')]

as recommended on the website: http://stockrt.github.com/p/emulating-a-browser-in-python-with-mechanize/

However, this did not work, so I decided to include elements of the missing forms using the following code:

 br.select_form(name='form') br.form.set_all_readonly(False) # allow changing the .value of all controls br.form.new_control('text','__EVENTARGUMENT',{'value':''}) br.form.new_control('text','__EVENTTARGET',{'value':''}) br.form.fixup() br["__EVENTTARGET"] = 'lbSearch' br["__EVENTARGUMENT"] = ''
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