mechanize_test.py

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import mechanize
import cookielib

b = mechanize.Browser()
b.set_handle_refresh(True)
b.set_debug_redirects(True)
b.set_handle_redirect(True)
b.set_debug_http(True)
cj = cookielib.CookieJar()
b.set_cookiejar(cj)

b.addheaders = [
    ('User-agent', 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/37.0.2062.94 Safari/537.36'),
    ('Accept', 'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8'),
    ('Host', 'www.fangraphs.com'),
    ('Referer', 'http://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=all&stats=bat&lg=all&qual=y&type=8&season=2014&month=0&season1=2014&ind=0')
]
b.open("http://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=all&stats=bat&lg=all&qual=y&type=8&season=2014&month=0&season1=2014&ind=0")

def is_form1_form(form):
    return "id" in form.attrs and form.attrs['id'] == "form1"

b.select_form(predicate=is_form1_form)
b.form.find_control(name='__EVENTTARGET').readonly = False
b.form.find_control(name='__EVENTARGUMENT').readonly = False
b.form['__EVENTTARGET'] = 'LeaderBoard1$cmdCSV'
b.form['__EVENTARGUMENT'] = ''

print b.submit().read()

I am trying to do what I think you're trying to do here. I am trying to download the .csv files from fangraphs.com. I have a script that works using selenium, but it needs a browser, and I'm looking for a headless solution like this one. When you run this, does it actually download the .csv file somewhere? When I run it, the print command just dumps the HTML content, not the .csv file. Thanks, and nice work!