This looks to be just what I was looking for. My only questions now
have to do with how enter data into strings or manipulate controls on
the web site. I appreciate the help.
Alexander Caldwell wrote:
>
> Otto Stolzenberger wrote:
>
> > Is it possible to have my TCL script navigate a web site such as
> > following links and entering data in text fields? I've used TCL to talk
> > to command line applications and remote servers. Some our applications
> > have web interfaces and I would love to be able to write a TCL
> > application to test those out as well. Is this possible?
>
> You could use the http library built into Tcl. You can get the
> documentation for that from the Tcl man pages. It can
> send a query to a web server and stores the response in an array variable.
> Then you can manipulate the response in various
> ways. I tried it for a project I was doing - I did run into some trouble
> when querying a site that tries to set a cookie - the server
> would refuse to send the desired response because it detects that you are
> using a "browser" that doesn't support cookies or javascript.
>
> Another way might be to use Tcl to control an external web browser program
> such as the Unix version of Netscape or
> lynx or you could use "wget" on Linux. In my project, I used Tcl to control
> the "remote" functions the programmers of Netscape built into it
> to sort of data-mine a medical web site for a set of drug interaction
> monographs on a list of drugs I use in my medical office.
> The Tcl script would send a query string to Netscape and it would then have
> Netscape store the response in a temporary file and
> I could then scan that file using regular expressions to extract the parts I
> wanted to store. You can effectively follow links and enter data into text
> fields by scanning the html file with regular expressions for the part
> associated with the text box or link and then forming a query string to send
> back to the server. This works well as long as the pages are consistent in
> format each time and you are getting say a large number of responses from a
> server of the same type. It might not work if you are navigating sites where
> you have no idea what you are going to come across but I doubt if you'd be
> using it that way. Using the remote functions of Netscape also got around the
> problem with
> cookies because Netscape supports cookies and javascript.
>
> There is a web page at http://www.netscape.com/newsref/std/x-remote.html
> that describes the "remote" functions of Netscape
> that can be controlled from Tcl.
>
> Alex Caldwell M.D.
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Tk_familypractice http://www.psnw.com/~alcald/#informatics
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