Hello Monks!

This is my first time trying to do some screen scraping. In my real life I use Perl to automate administration tasks and parse data. This is my first experience with OO and screen scraping. What I basically need to do is, log into my Netgear router, navigate to the page that shows the port rules and select/de-select radio buttons to open or close ports. Then submit the form.

I found that I can login with the LWP module and get the html from the correct page showing the port settings. I also found that can not login in when using Mechanize. I am having a bit of trouble getting the form name and the names of the fields.

So..... can you please tell me if I am on track?
I have plans on using LWP to login and get the resulting html that shows the port settings. Use Mechanize to select and de-select radio buttons. Use Mechanize to submit the form. Use LWP to get the html back and Tokeparser to get and display the final settings in a reportish looking type of output.

Does this sound like a good way of going about this? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I'm somewhat lost here.

Regards.

Edited by davido: Added formatting tags to match original input intent.


In reply to screen scraping by garskoci

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.