What are the common HTTP methods supported by MechanicalSoup?

MechanicalSoup is a Python library that provides a simple way to automate interaction with websites. It combines the requests library for HTTP requests and Beautiful Soup for parsing HTML, which makes it very useful for web scraping tasks that involve form submissions and navigation through links.

MechanicalSoup supports the most common HTTP methods that are needed for interacting with web forms and navigating websites. These methods are:

1. GET: This method requests data from a specified resource. In web scraping, it's commonly used to retrieve the HTML content of a page.

2. POST: This method sends data to a server to create/update a resource. It's typically used when submitting form data.

Here's a simple example to illustrate how to use these methods with MechanicalSoup:

import mechanicalsoup

# Create a browser object
browser = mechanicalsoup.Browser()

# Use the GET method to retrieve a web page
page = browser.get('http://example.com')

# Print the response
print(page.soup)

# If the page has a form we want to submit, we can use the POST method.
# First, select the form:
form = page.soup.form

# Fill out the form fields:
form['username'] = 'your_username'
form['password'] = 'your_password'

# Submit the form using the POST method
response = browser.submit(form, page.url)

# Print the response
print(response.text)

It's important to note that while MechanicalSoup is great for many tasks, it doesn't support JavaScript. If you need to interact with a website that relies heavily on JavaScript, you might need to use a more advanced tool like Selenium, Playwright or Puppeteer which can control a real browser.

MechanicalSoup simplifies the process of handling these HTTP methods by abstracting away the details and allowing you to focus on the logic of your web scraping task. Behind the scenes, it uses the requests library, which supports an extensive set of HTTP methods (e.g., PUT, DELETE, HEAD, OPTIONS, etc.), but typically, for web scraping purposes, GET and POST are the most commonly used methods.