I am trying to find a way to sign onto my Wall Street Journal account (http://online.wsj.com/public/us) and automatically download various financial pages on stocks and mutual funds that I am interested in tracking. I have a subscription to this site and am trying to figure out how to use python, which I have been trying to learn for the past year, to automatically login and capture a few different pages. I have mastered capturing web pages on non-password sites, but am struggling otherwise and have been trying to learn how to program the Mechanoid module (http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi/mechanoid) to get past the password protected site hurdle.
My questions are: 1. Is there an easier way to grab these pages from a password protected site, or is the use of Mechanoid a reasonable approach? 2. Is there an easy way of recording a web surfing session in Firefox to see what the browser sends to the site? I am thinking that this might help me better understand the Mechanoid commands, and more easily program it. I do a fair amount of VBA Programming in Microsoft Excel and have always found the Macro Recording feature a very useful starting point which has greatly helped me get up to speed. Thanks for your help/insights. Seymour -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
