[TriLUG] Web Form Data

Brian Henning brian at strutmasters.com
Mon Oct 16 10:43:23 EDT 2006


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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