Aryeh Gregor wrote:
Of course, maybe it's inconvenient to have to parse an HTML form. I actually find it hard to believe that there aren't easily usable frameworks for doing this.
I don't know about Python, but for Perl at least HTML::Form will do it just fine (as long as you're careful with charsets, it doesn't handle those quite automatically). Or use WWW::Mechanize, which is a higher level interface to that and a bunch of other modules.
http://search.cpan.org/dist/WWW-Mechanize/
Actually, a few minutes of Googling suggest it has been ported to Python:
http://wwwsearch.sourceforge.net/mechanize/