Oxylabs’ Residential Proxies integration with MechanicalSoup

Mechanical Soup is a Python library designed for automating web interactions such as submitting forms, following links and redirects. Since it is built on using Python requests and BeautifulSoup libraries, MechanicalSoup is often used as a library to perform some web-scraping operations, such as image extraction, due to the powerful integrated functions that comes in with it. In this tutorial, we're going to cover how you can integrate Oxylabs' Residential Proxies with MechanicalSoup and share a code sample for submitting an HTML form while using proxies.

Requirements

For the integration to work, you'll need to install it on your system. You can do it using pip command:

pip install mechanicalsoup

Python 3 or higher

Residential Proxies: https://oxy.yt/urSrl

Proxy Authentication

For proxies to work, you'll need to specify your Oxylabs Residential Proxy access credentials inside the main.py file.

USERNAME = "your_username"
PASSWORD = "your_password"
ENDPOINT = "pr.oxylabs.io:7777"

Adjust the your_username and your_password values with the username and password of your Oxylabs Residential Proxy access credentials.

Testing Proxy Connection

To see if the proxy is working, try visiting ip.oxylabs.io/location.
If everything is working correctly, it will return an IP address of a proxy that you're using.

Locating an HTML Form

Locating an HTML form in MechanicalSoup is relatively easy - all you have to do is to select it via CSS selector using a select_form method. It returns a soup object that can be later retrieved using form attribute. Here's an example of locating a form and printing its values in the input fields.

import mechanicalsoup

# Credentials of Oxylabs' Residential Proxy access.
USER = "your_username"
PASSWORD = "your_password"
ENDPOINT = "pr.oxylabs.io:7777"

proxies = {
    "http": f"http://{USER}:{PASSWORD}@{ENDPOINT}",
    "https": f"http://{USER}:{PASSWORD}@{ENDPOINT}",
}

def get_html_form(proxies):
    # Initiate a MechanicalSoup object.
    browser = mechanicalsoup.StatefulBrowser()
    browser.session.proxies = proxies 
    browser.open("https://httpbin.org/forms/post") 
    
    # Select a form in HTML using a CSS Selector.
    form = browser.select_form('form[action="/post"]')
    # Print the form field data.
    return form.print_summary()


if __name__ == "__main__":
    print(get_html_form(proxies))

Full Code: Submitting an HTML Form with Proxies

import mechanicalsoup

# Credentials for Oxylabs' Residential Proxy access.
USER = "your_username"
PASSWORD = "your_password"
ENDPOINT = "pr.oxylabs.io:7777"

proxies = {
    "http": f"http://{USER}:{PASSWORD}@{ENDPOINT}",
    "https": f"http://{USER}:{PASSWORD}@{ENDPOINT}",
}

def get_html_form(proxies):
    # Initiate a MechanicalSoup object.
    browser = mechanicalsoup.StatefulBrowser()
    browser.session.proxies = proxies 
    browser.open("https://httpbin.org/forms/post") 

    # Select a form in HTML using a CSS Selector.
    form = browser.select_form('form[action="/post"]')

    form_info = {
        "custname": "John",
        "custtel": "123",
        "custemail": "info@example.com",
        "size": "small",
        "topping": ("bacon", "cheese", "onion"),
        "delivery": "18:30",
        "comments": "I like pizza",
    }

    # Populate the form with values from the `form_info` dict.
    for key, value in form_info.items():
        form.set(key, value)

    # Launch a Browser.
    browser.launch_browser()
    response = browser.submit_selected()
    return response.text


if __name__ == "__main__":
    print(get_html_form(proxies))

If you're having any trouble integrating proxies with MechanicalSoup and this guide didn't help you - feel free to contact Oxylabs customer support at support@oxylabs.io.