On Thu, 8 Mar 2001, Warhurst, SI (Spencer) wrote: > I want to write a program a robot to perform a series of actions on a web > page form (ie: fill in some fields), submit it & then when the resulting > page is delivered performs further actions. However, I do not know where to > begin. For example, how do you read a web page displayed in a browser from a > separate program, and then how do you interact with it from that program?
Actually, you don't interact with it (unless dynamic even after you received it). If the web page form is the same everytime, then there is no need to retrieve it. But if you do need to fetch the webpage, you can use telnet, wget, lynx, perl modules, etc. (You didn't tell us what ioperating system you are using.) Then you'll need to write a parser to find the form information. Then you can use telnet or some perl module (or other) to post this information back using the GET or POST method for example. > Can anyone point me to a tutorial on this or give me some advice? I just read an interesting article in April 2001's Dr. Dobbs Journal (titled "Web Site Searching & Indexing in Perl"). I don't know if it is available online. If you use perl (it is available for numerous operating systems), you can use several perl modules to help you. Have a look at http://www.cpan.org/. Jeremy C. Reed http://www.reedmedia.net/ http://bsd.reedmedia.net/ -- BSD news and resources http://www.isp-faq.com/ -- find answers to your questions
