I am interested in writing a perl script that goes to the following link and extracts the number 1975: https://familysearch.org/search/collection/results#count=20&query=%2Bevent_place_level_1%3ACalifornia%20%2Bevent_place_level_2%3A%22San%20Diego%22%20%2Bbirth_year%3A1923-1923~%20%2Bgender%3AM%20%2Brace%3AWhite&collection_id=2000219
That website is the amount of white men born in the year 1923 who live in San Diego County, California in 1940. I am trying to do this in a loop structure to generalize over multiple counties and birth years.
I have installed WWW::Mechanize::Firefox.
Here is some code that I have written. I make to the forms section and then I'm completely confused as to what to do. :(
use strict;
use warnings;
use WWW::Mechanize::Firefox;
my $mech = WWW::Mechanize::Firefox->new(
activate => 1, # bring the tab to the foreground
);
$mech->get('https://familysearch.org/search/collection/results#count=2
+0&query=%2Bevent_place_level_1%3ACalifornia%20%2Bevent_place_level_2%
+3A%22San%20Diego%22%20%2Bbirth_year%3A1923-1923~%20%2Bgender%3AM%20%2
+Brace%3AWhite&collection_id=2000219',':content_file' => 'main.html',
+synchronize => 0);
my $retries = 10;
while ($retries-- and $mech->is_visible( xpath => '//*[@id="hourgl
+ass"]' )) {
print "Sleep until we find the thing\n";
sleep 2;
};
die "Timeout while waiting for application" if 0 > $retries;
# Now the hourglass is not visible anymore
#fill out the search form
my @forms = $mech->forms();
#<input id="census_bp" name="birth_place" type="text" tabindex="0"/>
+
#A selector prefixed with '#' must match the id attribute of the input
+. A selector prefixed with '.' matches the class attribute. A selecto
+r prefixed with '^' or with no prefix matches the name attribute.
$mech->field( birth_place => 'value_for_birth_place' );
# Click on the submit
$mech->click({xpath => '//*[@class="form-submit"]'});
Would appreciate any help in getting it to work!
