The behaviour with the browser is what is known as a 'session cookie' -the site sets it when you login and the browser keeps it until you end the session by closing the browser.
You handle the cookie using ClientCookie (Python 2.3) or cookielib (Python 2.4). You need to create a cookiejar instance and an opener that uses HTTPCookieProcessor (and your cookiejar). When you've done that - calls to your opener will fetch pages and handle the cookie *compeltely automatically*. There is an example of doing that at http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/articles.shtml#http The authentication is via an html form. You can handle this using ClientForm - or you can look at the HTML source of the page and just have your opener (as above) send the right values to the URL. If you have problems - post the details here and people will help. It is *possible* that the javascript does 'magic' on the form submission (client side encryption is one possibility). That is very hard to automatically duplicate from Python because you would need to parse the python and mimic the page DOM to duplicate the effect. It might be easier to use PAMIE to automate the form submission in the browser. I've never tried this myself - but seen the announcements here. Best Regards, Fuzzy http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python unfortunately voidspace is temporarily down :-( -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
