Hello - I need a little perl script that will retrieve a Web page
containing a form, and then will submit the as if a user had retrieved
the page in a browser and then clicked the submit button.

As an answer to this question, please devise a script that will fetch
a page specified in $url and then submit the form in it, assuming that
there is a submit button with the name attribute "submitbutton" and
with a value attribute of "submit".

Thank you.

Marc.

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Request for Question Clarification by palitoy-ga on 11 Sep 2005 12:15 PDT

Hello Marc

Thank-you for your question.

I am a little confused as to why you would require to download the
page with the form on first. You can process the form directly in Perl
by just passing the variables directly to the form processing page
(the page in the form access attribute) in you know the form pairs you
need to fill out.  The form pairs are easy to find if you simply
invesigate the HTML <form> tag.

If you simply download the form from a webpage and then immediately
submit it (as your question suggests) you will submit the form without
adding any values to the form fields.  You would normally fill these
in as a user.

Here is a simple example of submitting a form using GET:

###################################################
use URI;
use LWP::UserAgent;
# define your url
my $url;
$url = URI->new( $url );
# build query
$url->query_form(
  # the form pairs - fill these in with the values from the form in the url
  'submitbutton' => 'submit',
  'value1' => 'value'
);
# get the form
my $response = LWP::UserAgent->new->get( $url );
# print out the results
print $response->content;
###################################################

A similar solution can be easily built for a form that needs to use POST.

Let me know if this is sufficient for an answer and I will provide the
POST solution also.

palitoy-ga