Advanced Screen scraping ...maybe?

[bissquitt]

So I am working on a script to scrape ISBN information from my schools bookstore website. The problem is that this information is limited to viewing 10 departments and 20 classes at a time.

I essentialy need to select the first 10 depts, click a button, select the first 20 classes, press a button, press another button (printer friendly format for easier scraping), scrape for info and output or just output the whole page. go back and select the next 20 classes till the end etc.

In regular programming terms it would be as simple as a nested do/while loop but I have been unable to figure out how to press buttons in any traditional language or PHP.

here is the page - http://bookstore.umbc.edu/SelectTermDept.aspx?trm=

Even something to just grab the pages would be a huge help, I can modify the script to scrape the info or just use php to do it once i have all the data. I'm an autoIt n00b unfortunatly.

Many thanks for any help

[FireFox]

@bissquitt

Look for this functions in helpfile (F1 in scite)

Send()
MouseClick()

Cheers, FireFox.

[TurionAltec]

send() and mouseclick() are very sloppy ways of interacting with a browser window.

Try looking at the _IE UDFs in the IE.au3 library, they can interact more directly with an Internet Explorer web browser.

I haven't ever used any of the functions, but there's ones like

_IEFormElementCheckboxSelect

_IEFormElementRadioSelect

_IELoadWait

_IEBodyReadText

that might be useful

There may be UDFs for interacting with Firefox, but I can't find them right now.

Edited December 28, 2008 by TurionAltec

[Girish]

this blog has listed couple of good IE Automation example,

http://technologyyogi.blogspot.com