How do I simulate this to get to the information I want to extract actually?

With great patience and attention to detail.

It's just about impossible in the general case. Have a look at the WWW::Mechanize::FAQ, on the section "why don't you support JavaScript?". In a nutshell, you need to reimplement a JavaScript engine, and that's a non-trivial undertaking.

The usual way of going about automating a website that makes heavy use of JavaScript is to insert an HTTP::Proxy-based proxy between your client and the server, to record precisely what is being passed back and forth. At the lowest level, it's just GET, POST and following redirects, and doing the same thing in your program.

But depending on the site, this can be very difficult to do.

• another intruder with the mooring in the heart of the Perl

In reply to Re: Parsing AJAX-based website by grinder
in thread Parsing AJAX-based website by Anonymous Monk

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.