I need to automate/scrape data from IE

[CarlosT]

I've got a task that is just screaming for automation. Every week, I have to get a number for each of 36 entities for some metrics I do and that basically consists of counting the 'Y's in a certain column in a table on a company web page. Each entity requires picking a value in a dropdown, refreshing the page, and counting 'Y's. It's a slow, cumbersome, tedious, and vulnerable to error process. What I'd love is to point perl at the site and get back the numbers quickly and cleanly.

Here's what I do know (I don't know what matters):

• The site uses kerberos for authentication
• The site uses SSL
• the page only works reliably in Internet Explorer

I have no previous experience with web automation, so I'm flying fairly blind. I tried using LWP, but couldn't connect because of SSL issues. I then gave up on perl for a while and tried using greasemonkey, but that was when I discovered that the page didn't actually work with Firefox. So most recently I've been trying to use Win32-IEAutomation, but haven't been able to get that off the ground either. This is what I currently have:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
use Win32::IEAutomation;

# Create new instance of IE
my $ie =- Win32::IEAutomation->new ( visible => 1, maximize => 1);
my $url = 'https://internal.site.of.doom/';

$ie->gotoURL($url);

That gets me a blank IE window and an error message reading "Could not start AutoItX3 Control through OLE"

Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks,

Carlos