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Posted by Andy Hassall on 08/10/06 22:07
On 10 Aug 2006 14:25:33 -0700, "joe t." <thookerov@gmail.com> wrote:
>There is a website that requires me to log in using a web-form.
>Obviously, POST vars are sent and verified and on success i'm given a
>Session and/or Cookie. Within this logged-in area, there are links
>leading to data query result pages. "Click here for your recent
>transactions" kind of thing.
>
>Those results pages are what i want to get to, but through some kind of
>script that parses the results that get served out, not by user
>interaction. i want to send a request for a link within that logged in
>area and have the results served to my script, then parse out specific
>data from those results and in turn serve them to a user in my own
>page.
>
>i know that sounds shady, but the login is legitimate, the data access
>is legitimate, and the credentials are also valid. The problem is, i
>can't request a direct database link to the server hosting the actual
>data because of this nondisclosure agreement. It would require
>divulging the reasons for the need for such access, which my employer
>is not willing to reveal at this time.
>
>If there's anyone who can offer ideas or help, and wishes to keep
>possible answers off the public board, please email me. i realize this
>is a long shot, and i doubt that even if there IS a way, that anyone
>would be willing/able. But i gotta try.
Whilst this sort of situation is never the best way of doing things, sometimes
it's the only way. If you really do have to go down this route then there is a
particularly nice Perl module called WWW::Mechanize.
Obviously it's not PHP, but you can call Perl from PHP.
http://search.cpan.org/search?query=www%3A%3Amechanize&mode=all
Whilst you're in Perl, then it also has various HTML parsing modules, the most
obvious being HTML::Parser, which can deal with HTML even if it's of dubious
quality.
http://search.cpan.org/~gaas/HTML-Parser-3.55/Parser.pm
So combined you can have a Perl script that does all the hard stuff and then
returns its results in an easily machine-readable form to PHP.
--
Andy Hassall :: andy@andyh.co.uk :: http://www.andyh.co.uk
http://www.andyhsoftware.co.uk/space :: disk and FTP usage analysis tool
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