use WWW::Mechanize or LWP to interface with WEB

[learnperl]

I am developing a Perl script which takes user input and generate multiple outputs related to the user input. But What i want to do is that fill a certain website with the end results of my program. I read the documentation and fallowed some examples in WWW::Mechanize but I am still struggling to figure it out.. I have the fallowing the HTML and in that I have two fields that I would like to fill in with the results generated by my Perl script.

<div id="treeform" class="treeformWide"> 
 <form> 
  <div id="elementsContainer" class="clearfix"> 
    <div class="formElement"> 
    <label for="firstName">Your First Name</label> 
    <input id="tree_fn" size="15" type="text"> 
    </div> 
    <div class="formElement"> 
    <label for="lastName">Your Last Name</label> 
    <input id="tree_ln" size="15" type="text"> 
    </div> 
  <div class="formElement">
    <label for="gender">YourGender</label> 
    <select id="tree_gen" name="gender">
     <option selected="selected"value="M">Male</option>
     <option value="F">Female</option></select> 
   </div> 
  </div> 
 <div style="text-align: center; clear: both; padding-top: 10px;"> 
                            <input name="start" class="p_btn" id="star
+t" value="Get Started" onclick="submitInfo();s_objectID='hp_build_tre
+e';return false;" type="submit"> 
</div> 
</form> 
</div>

Here is the part of the my code that use the WWW:Mechanize, My code has other parts which are not related to the WWW:Mechanize, I didn't put all the code since those are not relevant to WWW::Mechanize.

#!/usr/bin/perl 

use Text::Soundex;
use LWP;
use WWW::Mechanize;

my $mechObject = WWW::Mechanize->new();
$mechObject -> get($url);
$mechObject->field($queryString);
$mechObject->click();

It will be a great help if someone could guide me on this.. Thanks in advance..

[erroneousBollock]

Something like this?

use WWW::Mechanize;
use strict;

my $url = 'http://server/path/to/form.html';
my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();

$mech->get($url);
die "can't get page!" 
  unless $mech->success &&
         $mech->content =~ /look for something/;

$mech->submit_form(with_fields => {
     tree_fn  => 'learn',
     tree_ln  => 'perl',
     tree_gen => [ option => 'M' ]
  });
die "can't submit form!" 
  unless $mech->success && 
         $mech->content =~ /something useful/;

(untested - nothing to test it against ;)

-David

[learnperl]

Thanks alot David, One issue I had before was that the html code taken from the site that I am running against of (http://www.ancestry.com/) is using
<input id="blabla"/> instead of <field name="blabla/>... How can we handle this issue. I tried the code that you submitted but I was getting a similar issue that I got before which was
There is no form with the requested fields at D:/PerlWorkSpace/Research/Genealogy/gen.pl line 226 Died at D:/Perl/lib/WWW/Mechanize.pm line 1715, <STDIN> line 1.

[erroneousBollock]

No field names, eh?

Try something like this:

use WWW::Mechanize;
use strict;

my $url = 'http://server/path/to/form.html';
my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();

$mech->get($url);
die "can't get page!" 
  unless $mech->success &&
         $mech->content =~ /look for something/;

die "can't find form!"
  unless $mech->form_number(0);

my @values = ('learn', 'perl', [option => 'M']);
die "couldn't fill out form!"
  unless $mech->set_visible(@values) == 3;

$mech->submit;
die "can't submit form!" 
  unless $mech->success && 
         $mech->content =~ /something useful/;

Any better?

-David

[naikonta]

You should select the form first to work on after the get() method. Saying $mechObject->form_number(1) means that work on the form number 1, which is the only form in the HTML. The field() method works on a single field, so you have to call it twice for to fill in two fields. The click() method returns HTTP::Response object so you may interested the clicking result or the content returned by the server.

my $resp = $mechObject->click;
die "Submit failed\n" if $resp->is_error;
my $content = $resp->content;
# do something with $content if necessary

However, if you have problem due the the JavaScript in the HTML source, check mechanize and javascript.