On 5/23/06, Michael Blasnik <[email protected]> wrote:
I think what the original post asked for (and what I would be interested in
as well) is a way to access web pages that are only created when an action
is taken or selection is made on a different web page, so there is no
specific web address that holds the data you want. I have thought about
trying to use auto-it or another scripting language to launch a browser,
make selections on a web page and then capture the data that's spawned
typically in a new window.
Do any of the tools mentioned by Kit or Phil actually do this?
I've recently started looking into using Perl to achieve exactly this.
Pass some parameters to a web-page that has a form on it and retrieve
the information that is returned by the web-page.
The module that achieves this in Perl is the LWP (Library for WWW in
Perl). This allows you to write a script which posts form data.
There is even an O'Rielly book on it, and an accompanying web-page
with (presumably) excrepted samples can be viewed at
http://perl.com/pub/a/2002/08/20/perlandlwp.html (see page 2 on how to
write a script which submits a query to altavista).
So yes it is possible, in Perl at least, and I'd imagine that Python
has similar capabilities (although I'm not aware of them).
Neil
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