Using cookies.txt file with Python Requests

MozillaCookieJar inherits from FileCookieJar which has the following docstring in its constructor:

Cookies are NOT loaded from the named file until either the .load() or.revert() method is called.

You need to call .load() method then.

Also, like Jermaine Xu noted the first line of the file needs to contain either # Netscape HTTP Cookie File or # HTTP Cookie File string. Files generated by the plugin you use do not contain such a string so you have to insert it yourself. I raised appropriate bug at http://code.google.com/p/cookie-txt-export/issues/detail?id=5

EDIT

Session cookies are saved with 0 in the 5th column. If you don't pass ignore_expires=True to load() method all such cookies are discarded when loading from a file.

File session_cookie.txt:

# Netscape HTTP Cookie File.domain.com TRUE    /   FALSE   0   name    value

Python script:

import cookielibcj = cookielib.MozillaCookieJar('session_cookie.txt')cj.load()print len(cj)

Output:0

EDIT 2

Although we managed to get cookies into the jar above they are subsequently discarded by cookielib because they still have 0 value in the expires attribute. To prevent this we have to set the expire time to some future time like so:

for cookie in cj:    # set cookie expire date to 14 days from now    cookie.expires = time.time() + 14 * 24 * 3600

EDIT 3

I checked both wget and curl and both use 0 expiry time to denote session cookies which means it's the de facto standard. However Python's implementation uses empty string for the same purpose hence the problem raised in the question. I think Python's behavior in this regard should be in line with what wget and curl do and that's why I raised the bug at http://bugs.python.org/issue17164
I'll note that replacing 0s with empty strings in the 5th column of the input file and passing ignore_discard=True to load() is the alternate way of solving the problem (no need to change expiry time in this case).

I tried taking into account everything that Piotr Dobrogost had valiantly figured out about MozillaCookieJar but to no avail. I got fed up and just parsed the damn cookies.txt myself and now all is well:

import reimport requestsdef parseCookieFile(cookiefile):    """Parse a cookies.txt file and return a dictionary of key value pairs    compatible with requests."""    cookies = {}    with open (cookiefile, 'r') as fp:        for line in fp:            if not re.match(r'^\#', line):                lineFields = line.strip().split('\t')                cookies[lineFields[5]] = lineFields[6]    return cookiescookies = parseCookieFile('cookies.txt')import pprintpprint.pprint(cookies)r = requests.get('https://example.com', cookies=cookies)

This worked for me:

from http.cookiejar import MozillaCookieJarfrom pathlib import Pathimport requestscookies = Path('/Users/name/cookies.txt')jar = MozillaCookieJar(cookies)jar.load()requests.get('https://path.to.site.com', cookies=jar)<Response [200]>