Manual Submission of HTML Queries

[Zero]

Hi folks,

 

I'm looking for some input on this topic in the case that someone else is also working on it. As you all know, getting a macro app to work with a Web Browser is a flawed, problematic and a massive & pain in the neck. The only solution I can think of so far that would likely work reliably well would be to use a Telnet application on port 80 of your target website (not for secure sites) and make manual HTTP requests for data. Once received, the text could be analyzed and then an appropriate POST response could be formulated and sent back to the site. Obviously this approach would entail quite a bit of work and would be fairly detailed, requiring building a nice library of macro-functions that can be called to get the job done in a neat, modularized fashion.

 

Does anyone have experience with this type of thing? Any input from developers (ie. do you think that coding this would be a better approach)?

 

Zero

[Cory]

I have had this in the back of my head for a long time for the same reasons as you. But I was dismayed when I determined one can't script telent sessions in Windows. You could use another terminal emulator application but I hate having to install another app for such a seemingly simple thing but it seems unavoidable. But I recently ran into a very old and free application Wget I am going to play with soon to do exactly what you are suggesting. The cool think is you can use command line parameters to do things like retrieving a web page. In the past I would open a page and then do a "View Source" and copy that to a file to avoid all the browser timing issues but with this I don't even need ot do that and with a "Wait for file exist/ready" all my timing issues will go away. Oh, and it can be run in silent mode!