[hobbit] - Internet sites testing

[Dan Vande More]

I've done many scripts like this in WWW::Automate using perl. That library
should be included with LWP::UserAgent.

It's quite reliable and very easy to use (assuming you know perl). I'd
highly recommend it to anyone seeking any sort of webautomation.

On 12/8/06, Ralph Mitchell <ralphmitchell at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 12/8/06, Henrik Stoerner <henrik at hswn.dk> wrote:
> > I've done it for one or two sites, and abandoned it because it is
> > incredibly fragile when dealing with real-world websites. You're
> > basically going to mimic the behaviour of a browser, but you probably
> > don't have an engine that is fully capable of handling JavaScript,
> > cookies, automated redirects and form submissions like a real browser
> > does.
>
> Curl handles cookies, redirects that happen via Location headers, and
> form submissions, for both regular sites and secure sites.
>
> My scripts all evolved under Big Brother, so they're all Bourne shell,
> using curl, grep, sed, head, tail, etc to process the pages.  There's
> a perl script on the curl home page (http://curl.haxx.se) called
> formfind.pl, which pulls out form elements.  I've got a hacked up copy
> of formfind.pl that hands me the form in a format suitable for posting
> back using curl.
>
> I used to have a script that logged into an airline booking system,
> picked out flights, and went through the whole booking sequence,
> stopping right before it would have had to enter credit card details.
> That was about 19 steps, I think.
>
> You don't necessarily have to be able to process javascript.  A lot of
> forms just use it to verify the data, which you can ignore.  I've run
> into a few that used javascript to modify the form variables and store
> the results into other form variables, but those aren't too hard to
> deal with once you understand what's happening.
>
> Probably the worst thing I've had to deal with was a page that
> assembled a new url from bits of the form elements, then jumped to it
> by setting location.href=[newurl].  That kind of thing almost has to
> be hardwired, and as Henrik says, that has a tendency to be a bit
> fragile.
>
> I think I've got an example script somewhere.  If I can find it, I'll post
> it.
>
> Ralph Mitchell
>
> To unsubscribe from the hobbit list, send an e-mail to
> hobbit-unsubscribe at hswn.dk
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.xymon.com/pipermail/xymon/attachments/20061208/27506ae0/attachment.html>