Using request.post to post multipart form data via python not working

Question

I'm trying to use http://www.camp.bicnirrh.res.in/featcalc/ to POST multipart/form-data via python 2.7. Specifically, I'm uploading a file (called 'Practice.txt') in FASTA format basically this format:

'>1(ENTER)STRINGOFSPECIFICCAPITALLETTERS'

to this site which also has a text box where you can also enter data manually (which I'm leaving blank). This data site also has checkbox options, of which I want to select 'Length', 'Net Charge', 'Aliphatic Index' and 'Hydrophobicity'. At the bottom of the page there is a 'Submit' button.
Currently, this is the code I've used for my POST response.

files = {'file': ('Practice.txt', open('Practice.txt', 'rb'))}
data = {'Length':'Length', 'Net Charge':'Net Charge', 'Aliphatic Index':'Aliphatic Index','Hydrophobicity':'Hydrophobicity'}
r = requests.post(url, files=files, data=data)
r.text

The problem is that none of this is coming back with any data when I do r.text. The website computes the values for all of these things when using the browser. I got WireShark, and I've been trying to look at the live feeds to see what exactly I'm sending to the server, and although I'm using the code above verbatim, it is not giving back the values that the browser would.

Does anyone have any ideas about why this might be happening/how to actually get data? Thanks for any input!

NorthCat · Accepted Answer · 2014-06-17 09:28:05Z

3

This will works:

import requests
import urllib

session = requests.Session()

file={'file':(open('practice.txt','r').read())}

url = 'http://www.camp.bicnirrh.res.in/featcalc/tt1.php'

payload = {
  'length'   :'length',     #Length
  'netcharge':'netcharge',  #Net Charge
  'aliphatic':'aliphatic',  #Aliphatic Index
  'gravy'    :'gravy'       #Hydrophobicity
  }

raw = urllib.urlencode(payload)

response = session.post(url, files=file, data=payload)

print(response.text)

All options:

payload = {
  'length'     :'length',      #Length
  'netcharge'  :'netcharge',   #Net Charge
  'amino'      :'amino',       #Amino acid composition
  'aliphatic'  :'aliphatic',   #Aliphatic Index
  'instability':'instability', #Instability Index
  'gravy'      :'gravy',       #Hydrophobicity
  'sec'        :'sec'          #Secondary Structure Propensity
  }

answered Jun 17, 2014 at 9:28

NorthCat

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2 Comments

NorthCat Over a year ago

@Shay Glad to have been of help! Feel free to accept my answerif you feel it was useful to you. :-) (meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/5234/…)

Shay Over a year ago

Thanks again for before. I was hoping you could help me out one more time with another POST request that should be identical to the one above, but for some reason it's not. I did everything above with slight changes - import requests, import urllib, session = requests.Session(), file={'file':(open('Bishop/newdenovo2.txt','r').read())}, url = 'camp.bicnirrh.res.in/predict/hii.php' payload = {"algo[]":"svm"} (since I just want the first checkbox item 'SVM'), the raw and response is identical to the one above. I can post this as a question too! Thank you again!

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