in reply to Completely Confused with Mechanize::Firefox Forms

use HTML::Form qw();
for my $form ($mech->forms) {
    print Dumper(HTML::Form->parse($form->{outerHTML}, $mech->uri));
}

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Re^2: Completely Confused with Mechanize::Firefox Forms
by help_3452 (Initiate) on Jul 12, 2013 at 17:36 UTC

    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]

        Ok cool I'll give that a go. My whole idea though is to try to avoid having to use firebug. I've been making scripts by hand for a little while and I wanted to take the time to make something a little more intelligent. I do understand I can only cover relatively simple scenarios, but i want to take more of the leg work out of setting up a scraper. Cheers all the same.

[reply]

        Ah ok ! Fair enough.

        What I'm trying to do is make a simplified 'web scraper' Frequently within our Org I need to collect data from various systems ( say checking the names on the internal colleague register )

        But we have many systems and some use javascript. Because of this I was leaning towards Mech::Firefox since it handles it for you.

        I envisaged putting in the internal web address, then receiving back a set of links, forms, etc which the user could then select. I would save the choices in a config file and so allow the user to avoid repetitive checks.

        So i'm bit confused by the answer as it suggest using HTML::Form but the documentation states it doesn't return this type of object. I'd like to understand it properly as I intend to expand the code substantially

[reply]
Re^2: Completely Confused with Mechanize::Firefox Forms
by Anonymous Monk on Jul 13, 2013 at 07:43 UTC
    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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