Login to facebook using urllib

Hi!

I am trying to login to facebook and scrape some data programmatically. I would like to used python and urllib2. This shouldn’t be too difficult. But I’m having trouble getting the login to work and I’m not really sure what is wrong.

Please, take a look at my code below, specifically the login function, and point me in the right direction. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Full Disclosure: I’m new to python and am still learning how http works. But I know the basics.

[CODE]
import urllib, urllib2, cookielib, gzip, StringIO
import re # regex

# will have this info passed in the future
email = “***@gmail.com”
passwd = “***”

cookies = cookielib.CookieJar()

headers={
‘User-Agent’:’Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:13.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/13.0.1′,
‘Accept’:’text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8′,
‘Accept-Language’:’en-us,en;q=0.5′,
#’Accept-Encoding’:’gzip’,
‘Connection’:’keep-alive’,
‘Cache-Control’:’max-age=3600′,
‘Content-Type’:’application/x-www-form-urlencoded’
}

urls= {
“findfriends”:”http://www.facebook.com/find-friends/browser/”,
“facebook”:”http://www.facebook.com/”
}

def getPage(url,data=”):
“””Returns page’s HTML.
Args[0] = URL
Args[1] = Data
“””
req = urllib2.Request(url,headers=headers)
response = urllib2.urlopen(req)
return response

def login(email,passwd):
“””Logs into facebook with passed credentials
“””

url=”http://www.facebook.com/index.php”
response=getPage(url) # Go to facebook.com to get initial cookies

# Should be able to get all this info (exept u/n and p/w) from response. But how?
opts= (
(‘lsd’,’AVrB8vRK’),
(’email’,email),
(‘pass’,passwd),
(‘persistent’,’1′), # 0 or 1 for persistant to not
(‘default_persistent’,’1′),
(‘charset_test’,’%E2%82%AC%2C%C2%B4%2C%E2%82%AC%2C%C2%B4%2C%E6%B0%B4%2C%D0%94%2C%D0%84′),
(‘timezone’,’240′),
(‘return_session’,’0′),
(‘legacy_return’,’1′),
(‘display’,”),
(‘session_key_only’,’0′),
(‘lgnrnd’,’191955_7tXF’),
(‘lgnjs’,’n’),
(‘login’,’Log+In’)
)

data = urllib.urlencode(opts)
print data
request = urllib2.Request(url, data, headers, origin_req_host=”https://www.facebook.com/login.php?login_attempt=1″) # Should req_host be part of the header?
print request

cookies.extract_cookies(response,request)

cookie_handler= urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor( cookies )
redirect_handler= urllib2.HTTPRedirectHandler()
opener = urllib2.build_opener(redirect_handler,cookie_handler)

response = opener.open(request)

# Decode gzip encoding
if response.info().get(‘Content-Encoding’) == ‘gzip’:
buf = StringIO.StringIO( response.read())
f = gzip.GzipFile(fileobj=buf)
data = f.read()
return data
else:
return response.read()

if __name__==”__main__”:

# Write output to fb.html
f = open(‘./fb.html’, ‘w’) # Check fb.html to see if we are logged in.
f.write(login(email,passwd))
f.close()

[/CODE]