I'm a Unix C programmer, with an intermediate knowledge in shell scripting as well. PHP and perl are something new to me - something which i have to discover yet.

I always needed to solve a personal problem but i didn't know how - The problem is to be able to automatically fill in a web-page form and send it automatically by means of a program. Recently some friends told me that 'they think' that it can be done by PHP or perl.

Which solution do you advise me to adopt - PHP or perl? I'm looking for the quickest (and thus intelligent) solution, before doing my research on that particular language to be able to solve the problem.

PS: This is not a PHP vs perl war, ok guys?

Regards,
Ganni.

I just got an email about this very thing:


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Question:
How do I automate an HTML form submission?

If you're submitting values using the GET method, create a URL and
encode the form using the `query_form' method:

use LWP::Simple;
use URI::URL;

my $url = url('http://www.perl.com/cgi-bin/cpan_mod');
$url->query_form(module => 'DB_File', readme => 1);
$content = get($url);

If you're using the POST method, create your own user agent and
encode the content appropriately.

use HTTP::Request::Common qw(POST);
use LWP::UserAgent;

$ua = LWP::UserAgent->new();
my $req = POST 'http://www.perl.com/cgi-bin/cpan_mod',
[ module => 'DB_File', readme => 1 ];
$content = $ua->request($req)->as_string;


--

"use LWP, use URI.."

That means that i need to install those 2 libraries?

I have to ask, this web form you want to fill in.
I assume it is one of your own creation, if so why not just use the data you would have placed on the form, pass it straight into either PHP or Perl mail function and do it that way.

No, Andy - the website residing the form is not mine. My idea was to use a web-based SMS service (for members only) to use a script to send an SMS. The site is http://www.go.com.mt but can be anything afaik. So after filling the account number and password, the script must also fill another form (which will load on another page) to fill the recepients mobile phone number and the actual sms message. So that's the concept :P

OK so I think the best advice I can give would be to look at faking the send like m0rl0ck suggested.
Find the HTML for the form, find out the method (GET/POST) and the fields that are sent to what URL and make a script which will fake all this and send it to the above URL.

I couldn't find the form on the site BTW, any chance of the URL for the form.

Yeah infact that's the best/easiest thing that had to be done.