See If U Can Figure This Out!

[mcfr1es]

On a certain forum (neopets.com), the author's name, date, and topic are listed in table (grid)

I tried a copy-and-paste method as seen below which highlights the authors name and copies it (only the highlighting is implemented at the moment) this method doesnt work however, as the author's boxes are of varying heights and after the first irregular box that the script encounters all of the other values are thrown off....

For $boardnum = 1 to 24 Step 1
   send ("http://www.neopets.com/neoboards/boardlist.phtml?board=" & $boardnum & "{ENTER}")
   sleep (5000) 
   For $pagenum = 1 to 1002 Step 50
      If $pagenum > 1 Then 
         Sleep (1000)
         MouseClick("left", 75, 100, 1, 5)
         send ("http://www.neopets.com/neoboards/boardlist.phtml?board=1&next=" & $pagenum & "{ENTER}")
         sleep (5000)
      EndIf
      MouseClick ("left", 1241,905,1,5)
      sleep (5000)
      MouseWheel ( "down", 2 )
      While $y1 <= 915 AND $y2 <= 935
         MouseClickDrag ( "left", 424, $y1, 544, $y2, 5)  
         $y1=$y1+30
         $y2=$y2+30  
      Wend 
   Next
Next

Anyone have any ideas or any other methods?

I've been considering ctrl-A+ctrl-C'ing it all and saving to text file but I dont see how I would extract the names from there.

Edited August 9, 2004 by mcfr1es

[Bartokv]

Unfortunately I'm not registered with them, so I'm not able to see what you're talking about...

However, I'd recommend that you find which page is being displayed. Then use the URLDownloadToFile command to pull a copy of that page down for local parsing.

If their site utilizes dynamic pages that are generated from a common set of scripts, then you should be able to identify common tags/comments that you can query for within your utility. This probably isn't the answer that you were looking for, but it'd me more reliable than trying to implement some kind of screen-scrape routine.

Hope this helps!