Hey there, i am looking for a web browser that i can manipulate from the command line.
i know that with mozilla i have about six or seven commands that i read about on the mozilla website, like
mozilla - remote "openurl(www.somethingorother.com)"
and an already open mozilla browser will go there.
really cool. but i need one that can do more stuff, like download a page and maybe even send an email (right now it can just open the email program window)

so, i guess it doesn't matter what browser i use ( konqueror, firefox, galeon, whatever) as long as it can be controlled from a command line.

anybody know of any?

thanks

netcat (Try sourceforge.net) should work for some of that stuff.

thanks, i looked at the project page at sourceforge, but i am going to have to download it and extract the docs..
good news though, there is a deb package for it ! cool

Do you mean a browser that runs on the command line? If so then look at links, elinks or lynx (they are all very similar).

Or do you mean a browser that can be scripted from the command line? I'm not sure about this but you could maybe look at something like this: http://www.klaralvdalens-datakonsult...kdexecutor#kde and use it with KDE's konqueror web browser.

it looks good, konqueror would work just fine.
what i really need to do, is open a page in a web browser, download it, and extract some data values out of it for some math i gotta do in an application at work. i tried using some of the modules in python, but because the webpage has embeded javascript in it. the url library does not work with it.
so, i need some way do save a file to disk from an app that supports javascript.
whew --
i know i am not the only one out there trying to do this. There actually is a python module that wraps the spidermonkey mozilla javascript thing, but i couldnt get it to compile in debian. maybe i should set up a simple slack or vector machine just for this kind of thing. It does a little better with getting stuff installed that is compiled from source. Man, am i rambling or what ? kinda tired. thanks for all your help.

Sounds like you're talking about 'screen scraping'. Just google around for 'screen scraping Linux' and phrases like that and you should find some scripts and howtos.

You probably need to install the -devel packages for whatever it compiles against. Anyway most Python modules shouldn't need to be compiled should they? Most are written in Python, not C.

well this one has install instructions that go ./configure make and make install.
it is weird, usually when i use a python module, it justs comes with a setup.py install script that i run. that or i just put the whole thing into the directory that the script will run from .

google has turned up a lot for screen scraping indeed, but almost everything just reads html, or xml.

thanks for your help. there is a really easy to use python module called BeautifulSoup (of all things) but it is only good after the html is ready.