[SGVLUG] Polling Web Sites

John E. Kreznar jek at ininx.com
Thu Nov 29 01:01:36 PST 2007


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"Robert Leyva" <mrflash818 at geophile.net> writes:

> That sounds like a design change or addition to a site.

> Allow people to download a form, then just upload the completed form
> securely.

> [...]

> For you to work with a site that doesn't have such functionality,
> the best alternative I can think of would be to keep a browser
> session with the page open, fill it out at your leisure (leaving the
> PC on... hours, days, weeks?), then do copy/paste to an active
> session when you are ready to order.

Yeah, that's approximately the procedure I was thinking.  No need to
leave a browser open, though.  The source for the page can be saved
when the it's first fetched (as wget does anyway), and re-rendered
from that as needed.  Anyway, the filled in data usually become just
"value" fields in the response URL to be used in the follow-on GET or
POST request, so the script can compose that URL as required without
even re-rendering the page at all.  A URL such as this sometimes has
an embedded "Session ID" field and the script would have to recognize
that and merge the completed value fields from the original URL with
the Session ID from the new "active session" URL.  And then on top of
all this comes the security part.  Ideally, one would like to convert
between session-oriented SSL and message-oriented PGP.

This is a bit of scripting.  I haven't gotten around to doing it.  Has
anybody else?

- -- 
 John E. Kreznar jek at ininx.com 9F1148454619A5F08550 705961A47CC541AFEF13

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