The saga continues... after many patches, and diversions, and attempts to grok, I finally got PBP to work for a variety of purposes. In particular, I can now:
- Use maxq to record browsing sessions to PBP scripts, and run those scripts successfully in PBP;
- Use an only slightly altered HTMLParser.HTMLParser class to parse the moderately crappy SourceForge/mailman output;
- Grok RFC 2965 cookies well enough to actually log into and play with mailman admindb pages;
- Save, load, and view cookies in PBP.
I've submitted a bunch of patches to PBP & hopefully Cory can take a look at them in the next few weeks.
HTML/HTTP/URL support in Python's base is surprisingly messy, given my past experience with Python modules. I look forward to the day when Python 2.4 or above is the standard and 2.3 is no longer supported -- it will make cookie and URL handling much simpler!
I may spend some quality time refitting the HTMLParser classes in the htmllib and HTMLParser modules; as-is, they don't have good failure modes.
--titus
"He realized the fastest way to change is to laugh at your own folly -- then you can let go and quickly move on."-- via Dossy Shiobara