Are you comfortable with perl? There's a perl module called
LWP::UserAgent that takes care of all the low-level stuff involved with
connecting to a web site and requesting a document (or posting form
data). It can be had from CPAN, or find a package rolled for your
particular distribution if you like having your system's package manager
stay in control of Perl modules.
Check with the folks that run the website before you launch too far into
this project. If they even have a Terms of Service, it may be a
violation to use their service through any automated tool. (For
example, Google gets very antsy if you use an automated tool to retrieve
their listings.. How these monitoring services get away with it is
beyond me)
Cheers,
~Brian
Mark Freeze wrote:
I am hoping someone can help me solve an issue we are having at work.
In the course of a day, we have literally hundreds of account numbers
we look up on one of our vendors websites. We are usually just
looking for a particular status code. This process takes a huge
amount of time as the account numbers have to be entered one by one.
What I am looking to do is to automate this process. I'd like to
create a text file of account numbers on my local system, log into the
website, and then have a script or something march through the account
numbers automatically, entering them on the vendor's form, retrieve
the results, and place them into another text file on the local
system.
I have seen several companies on the internet that sell software to do
this, but I'd really like to write it myself. Can someone kick me in
the right direction of how to get started on this project?
Thanks,
Mark.
--
----------------
Brian A. Henning
strutmasters.com
336.597.2397x238
----------------
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