Re^6: fetching and storing data from web.

[choroba]

Is your browser running the MozRepl extension?

[chessgui]

I've just googled the english part of the error message and it turned out that this is a typical problem for lamers: it is not enough to install the mozrepl extension but you have to explicitly run it or set the option 'Activate on startup' :). Now I'm able to open a web page. But it is still not clear how to use this module to submit a form or login to some site. Is there any tutorial on this that you recommend?

[Corion]

I try to make using WWW::Mechanize::Firefox easy. Please tell me what you found unusable about the WWW::Mechanize::Firefox documentation, and especially WWW::Mechabize::Firefox::Examples and WWW::Mechanize::Firefox::Troubleshooting. They get distributed with the module itself. Searching for www::mechanize::firefox examples also returns that document on CPAN as the first hit to me, so if you tell me what search engine you used, or why you disregarded that result, I can use that information to improve the documentation.

[chessgui]

It took me two hours to build the module on Win32. I got so frustrated that I've just put the name of the module to the search engine in the hope to get something working. If I do a proper search the first hit is the examples page you mentioned so no problem there.

By the way grats for your module: it is really business like. Automatically looking up the form suitable for the given fields is really handy. I know what I mean: I parse forms manually from web pages and when the structure of the page changes ( form 5 suddenly becomes form 4 ) the whole application fails.

[choroba]

It uses the same API as WWW::Mechanize, so just see WWW::Mechanize::Examples.

[chessgui]

Thanks. By reworking one of the examples I was able to put together a code which opens the Firefox browser, loads the CPAN search page, fills in the query field with 'WWW::Mechanize' and then submits the form:


#!/usr/bin/perl

    use strict;
    use warnings;

    # the module we're looking for
    my $module_name = 'WWW::Mechanize';

    # create a new browser
    use WWW::Mechanize::Firefox;
    my $browser = WWW::Mechanize::Firefox->new(
    launch => 'C:/Program Files/Mozilla Firefox/firefox.exe',tab=>'cur
+rent'
    );

    # tell it to get the main page
    $browser->get("http://search.cpan.org/");

    # submit the query form
    $browser->submit_form(with_fields=>{query=>$module_name});