MechanicalSoup's browser.form.new_control() breaks compatibility with Mechanize

[johnhawkinson]

MechanicalSoup's browser.form.new_control() appears to break compatibility with Mechanize, at least the way I was using it. It would be nice if the Mechanize form were supported too, or at least if there was guidance on this in the documenation.

In Mechanize, I was using:

    br.form.new_control('text', "javax.faces.partial.ajax" ,{'value': 'true'} )

But in MechanicalSoup, it needs to be:

    br.form.new_control('text', "javax.faces.partial.ajax", 'true')

[moy]

Just being curious: why are you porting code from Mechanize to MechanicalSoup?

MechanicalSoup was inspired from Mechanize, but doesn't really attempt any compatibility. It would be rather easy to accept a dict where a string is is currently mandatory, though. No time for this right now :-(.

[johnhawkinson]

Just being curious: why are you porting code from Mechanize to MechanicalSoup?

Well, I'd like to say the reason is I wanted connection-reuse, which MechanicalSoup supports via Requests, and Mechanize does not…

But the real reason is that I thought I had found a bug deep inside the guts of Mechanize's urllib2 fork and after tearing my hair out for the better part of the day, I decided it would better to move to MechanicalSoup. Turns out the problem was there too and it was actually a server-side bug, a possibility I had previously eliminated through a faulty diagnostic process. A colleague rightly pointed out I should have set up an https proxy much earlier in my diagnostic process.