How can I mimic CGI form submission (METHOD=POST)?

os.startfile(r'c:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe')

How can I mimic CGI form submission (METHOD=POST)?
I would like to retrieve web pages that are the result of POSTing a form. Is there existing code that would let me do this easily?

Yes. Here's a simple example that uses httplib:

#!/usr/local/bin/python

import httplib, sys, time

### build the query string
qs = "First=Josephine&MI=Q&Last=Public"

### connect and send the server a path
httpobj = httplib.HTTP('www.some-server.out-there', 80)
httpobj.putrequest('POST', '/cgi-bin/some-cgi-script')
### now generate the rest of the HTTP headers...
httpobj.putheader('Accept', '*/*')
httpobj.putheader('Connection', 'Keep-Alive')
httpobj.putheader('Content-type', 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded')
httpobj.putheader('Content-length', '%d' % len(qs))
httpobj.endheaders()
httpobj.send(qs)
### find out what the server said in response...
reply, msg, hdrs = httpobj.getreply()
if reply != 200:
sys.stdout.write(httpobj.getfile().read())

Note that in general for URL-encoded POST operations, query strings must be quoted by using urllib.quote(). For example to send name="Guy Steele, Jr.":

>>> from urllib import quote
>>> x = quote("Guy Steele, Jr.")
>>> x
'Guy%20Steele,%20Jr.'
>>> query_string = "name="+x
>>> query_string
'name=Guy%20Steele,%20Jr.'