WWW::Mechanize "Input not found"

[ScottJohn]

Hello Perl Monks,

I was trying to scrap data from the following website: http://web1.ncaa.org/stats/StatsSrv/careersearch and am getting the following message on 2 of 3 selection fields: "Input 'field x' not found..."

I am confused why it is apparently working for 1 field, but not the other 2. (I didn't paste the page source data since it was probably too large.) The site does navigate using Javascript. I hear that Java-based can be difficult to scrape using Perl. Should I try some other method?

My code is below:

use strict;
use warnings;
use WWW::Mechanize;
my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();
my $outfile = "testNCAAdata.txt";
open(OUTFILE, ">$outfile");
my $url = "http://web1.ncaa.org/stats/StatsSrv/careersearch";
$mech->get($url);
$mech->select('searchOrg','328');
$mech->select('academicYear','2009');
$mech->select('searchSport','MBB');
$mech->click();
$mech->click('submit',[0,1]);
$mech->get($url);
my $output_page = $mech->content();
print OUTFILE "$output_page";
close(OUTFILE);

I really appreciate any help you guys can offer. Thanks

[Anonymous Monk]

I was trying to scrap data from the following website

Um, scrap means throw away, recycle, chop into little pieces, melt down

The site does navigate using Javascript. I hear that Java-based can be difficult to scrape using Perl. Should I try some other method?

For the solution to every scraping problem, see Re^5: can't get WWW::Mechanize to sign in on JustAnswer or Web Testing with HTTP::Recorder or WWW::Mechanize::Firefox

 mech-dump http://web1.ncaa.org/stats/StatsSrv/careersearch will show you the noscript version of html, and indeed, one of the fields you try to populate doesn't exist in the html only browser