On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, Ted Sung wrote:
> I want to be able programmatically to go to a web site, enter a value
> in one of the text boxes provided and hit submit and then have the
> returned page to parse through. What is the simplest way to do this?
Assuming you're talking about a pre-existing page somewhere out on the web
already, go to that page & view the html source. Most likely there will be
a form structure, a submission method (put or get) and one or more input
elements.
In the simplest case, if the form issues a GET request for just one field,
then it's constructing a http request something like this:
GET http://site.com/cgi-bin/page.pl?text=Your%20text
So, all you have to do is copy that -- figure out what you want the input
text to be and GET it.
#!/bin/perl
# getsitepage.pl
use strict;
use LWP::Simple;
my $text = $ARGV[0];
my $url = "http://site.com/cgi-bin/page.pl?text=$text";;
print (get $url);
And then run it as, for example:
c:\perl\> perl getsitepage.pl "your text"
...and it will then dump out the resulting page.
If you need to programmatically analyze both the submission page and the
result page, the work is a little bit harder, but still it's not so bad,
and the code above gives you the core idea.
Check out _Web Client Programming with Perl_, available online for free at
<http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/webclient/>.
Chapter five begins the discussion of what you're trying to do.
<http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/webclient/ch05.html>
The next chapter gives more complex examples, including a program that
periodically checks on the status of a package with FedEx:
<http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/webclient/ch06.html>
--
Chris Devers [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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