Re: Help to automatically traverse a login session

On 10 Aug 2006 14:25:33 -0700, "joe t." <thookerov@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

There is a website that requires me to log in using a web-form.
Obviously, POST vars are sent and verified and on success i'm given a
Session and/or Cookie. Within this logged-in area, there are links
leading to data query result pages. "Click here for your recent
transactions" kind of thing.

Those results pages are what i want to get to, but through some kind of
script that parses the results that get served out, not by user
interaction. i want to send a request for a link within that logged in
area and have the results served to my script, then parse out specific
data from those results and in turn serve them to a user in my own
page.

i know that sounds shady, but the login is legitimate, the data access
is legitimate, and the credentials are also valid. The problem is, i
can't request a direct database link to the server hosting the actual
data because of this nondisclosure agreement. It would require
divulging the reasons for the need for such access, which my employer
is not willing to reveal at this time.

If there's anyone who can offer ideas or help, and wishes to keep
possible answers off the public board, please email me. i realize this
is a long shot, and i doubt that even if there IS a way, that anyone
would be willing/able. But i gotta try.

Whilst this sort of situation is never the best way of doing things, sometimes
it's the only way. If you really do have to go down this route then there is a
particularly nice Perl module called WWW::Mechanize.

Obviously it's not PHP, but you can call Perl from PHP.

http://search.cpan.org/search?query=www%3A%3Amechanize&mode=all

Whilst you're in Perl, then it also has various HTML parsing modules, the most
obvious being HTML::Parser, which can deal with HTML even if it's of dubious
quality.

http://search.cpan.org/~gaas/HTML-Parser-3.55/Parser.pm

So combined you can have a Perl script that does all the hard stuff and then
returns its results in an easily machine-readable form to PHP.

--
Andy Hassall :: andy@xxxxxxxxxxx :: http://www.andyh.co.uk
http://www.andyhsoftware.co.uk/space :: disk and FTP usage analysis tool
.

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