browsercookie

Browser Cookie

The browsercookie module loads cookies used by your web browser into a cookiejar object. This can be useful if you want to use python to download the same content you see in the web browser without needing to login.

Install

.. sourcecode:: bash

    pip install browsercookie

On Windows the builtin sqlite module will raise an error when loading the FireFox database. An updated version of sqlite can be installed with:

.. sourcecode:: bash

    pip install pysqlite

Usage

Here is a hack to extract the title from a webpage:

.. sourcecode:: python

>>> import re
>>> get_title = lambda html: re.findall('<title>(.*?)</title>', html, flags=re.DOTALL)[0].strip()

And here is the webpage title when downloaded normally:

.. sourcecode:: python

>>> import urllib2
>>> url = 'https://bitbucket.org/'
>>> public_html = urllib2.urlopen(url).read()
>>> get_title(public_html)
'Git and Mercurial code management for teams'

Now let's try with browsercookie - make sure you are logged into Bitbucket in Firefox before trying this example:

.. sourcecode:: python

>>> import browsercookie
>>> cj = browsercookie.firefox()
>>> opener = urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor(cj))
>>> login_html = opener.open(url).read()
>>> get_title(login_html)
'richardpenman / home — Bitbucket'

Differences with Python3:

.. sourcecode:: python

>>> import urllib.request
>>> public_html = urllib.request.urlopen(url).read()
>>> opener = urllib.request.build_opener(urllib.request.HTTPCookieProcessor(cj))

You should see your own username here, meaning the module successfully loaded the cookies from Firefox.

Here is an alternative example with requests <http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/>__, this time loading the Chrome cookies. Again make sure you are logged into Bitbucket in Chrome before running this:

.. sourcecode:: python

>>> import requests
>>> cj = browsercookie.chrome()
>>> r = requests.get(url, cookies=cj)
>>> get_title(r.content)
'richardpenman / home — Bitbucket'

Alternatively if you don't know/care which browser has the cookies you want then all available browser cookies can be loaded:

.. sourcecode:: python

>>> cj = browsercookie.load()
>>> r = requests.get(url, cookies=cj)
>>> get_title(r.content)
'richardpenman / home — Bitbucket'

Contribute

So far the following platforms are supported:

• Chrome: Linux, OSX, Windows
• Firefox: Linux, OSX, Windows

However I only tested on a single version of each browser and so am not sure if the cookie sqlite format changes location or format in earlier/later versions. If you experience a problem please open an issue <https://bitbucket.org/richardpenman/browsercookie/issues/new>__ which includes details of the browser version and operating system. Also patches to support other browsers are very welcome, particularly for Internet Explorer on Windows.

Acknowledgements

• Nathan Henrie for his example of how to decode the Chrome cookies <http://n8henrie.com/2013/11/use-chromes-cookies-for-easier-downloading-with-python-requests/>__
• Graeme Robinson for his Chrome Windows patch