help_3452 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello All, I need help! I'm totally confused.
I'm trying to access and list the forms available on a page using WWW::Mechanize::Firefox
It is not behaving as I expected.

 
use strict;
use warnings;
use diagnostics; 
use Data::Dumper;
use WWW::Mechanize::Firefox;


my $mech = WWW::Mechanize::Firefox->new(
    #env_proxy  => 1,
    #keep_alive => 1,
    #timeout    => 30,
    #autocheck  => 1,
    autoclose => 1, 
    js_JSON => 'native'
);
 
$mech->get("http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_forms.asp");

    my $index; 
    my @forms = $mech->forms();
    my $form_obj ;

    while ( ($index, $form_obj) = each @forms) {
        print "$index : ", $form_obj , "\n";
        #print Dumper ($form_obj), "\n";
                }

exit;

[download]

The $form_obj that is returned is a MozRepl::RemoteObject::Instance.
When I do a print Dumper on it, i can't see anything remotely useful. Everything appears to be describing the connection to Firefox, and i can't see anything to do with a form.
What I'm trying to do is print a list of forms available on a page and then allow the user to select the form in order to input some data.
I've tried googling for some examples of forms with Mechanize::Firefox and MozRepl::RemoteOjects but what i found was neither clear nor well explained. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Completely Confused with Mechanize::Firefox Forms
by daxim (Curate) on Jul 12, 2013 at 17:15 UTC 
    use HTML::Form qw();
for my $form ($mech->forms) {
    print Dumper(HTML::Form->parse($form->{outerHTML}, $mech->uri));
}

    [download]
[reply]
[d/l]

      Ok that's great, thank you very much BUT now I'm a bit more confused!
      This is the blurb from the Mechanize::Firefox documentation

      " $mech->current_form() print $mech->current_form->{name}; Returns the current form. This method is incompatible with WWW::Mechanize. It returns the DOM <form> object and not a HTML::Form instance."

      Thank you nonetheless! Is there 'proper' way to do this ?? Or is the documentation wrong / inaccurate !

[reply]
        Hi there. I'm not clear on what you want exactly. You just want the names of the forms? WWW::Mechanize has a dump_forms method- so you may not need Mechanize::Firefox. Also, If you use the firefox 'firebug' extension, you can inspect any html element and then use the name or value in the script to mechanize what you want to do..
[reply]
      forns returns HTML::Form objects, so they're already HTML::Form objects, why reparse?
[reply]
        bahm, firefox doesn't return HTML::Form objects
[reply]

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