Hi,

This is my first post. I hope it's not TOO awful. :)

I'm currently trying to finish a rather nasty script I've been working on for a while. I'm down to the last section of it, which entails sending search data to a web site and then writing the data retrieved by the web site to a flat file.

I'm pretty familiar with the LWP library at this point. I know how to use UserAgent and Request objects to grab raw HTML using a URL, and I can parse the HTML as well. Thing is, I don't want to have to do that.

The site I'm querying uses forms for input, so I could easily send the data I want to query on (ex. widget 2345A) using a POST method in my Request. However, I've looked at the document source for this site's results page, and it's pretty hideous. I'm assuming that by using a Request object, I'm only going to get the automatically generated result page in HTML in the Response.

Is there any way I can submit the request more directly without having to bother with simulating a form submission via a Request by a UserAgent? Is there any way I can just have the data returned back to me sans HTML document? (ex. $description,$price,$size) If LWP is NOT the correct library, what should I use?

I really have no idea what's running on the site's back end... Sorry! :(

Thanks to anybody who can help.

-------------------------------------------------
Dev Goddess
Developer / Analyst / Criminal Mastermind

"Size doesn't matter. It's all about speed and performance."

In reply to Is there a way to get data from a queried web site without having to parse the resulting HTML? by devgoddess

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