My advice is to ignore the AJAX layer and target the lower-level HTTP requests going from the browser to the server. You can capture these using a proxy like HTTP::Recorder or something like the FireBug plugin.

If you're lucky you'll find that underneath the glitzy AJAX there's a relatively simple protocol - the browser POSTs some data (user/pass) and gets back some JSON or XML indicating the result (login succeeded or failed). You can then use WWW::Mechanize to imitate that protocol and extract the info you need. If the site authors did a good job this can actually be easier than scraping an HTML page.

Good luck!

-sam

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

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