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

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:

pip install pysqlite

Usage

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

>>> 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:

>>> 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:

>>> 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:

>>> 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, this time loading the Chrome cookies. Again make sure you are logged into Bitbucket in Chrome before running this:

>>> 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:

>>> 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 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
• Graeme Robinson for his Chrome Windows patch