Hey monks... I've not been here in a long while. In fact, I've been cheating on you by using PHP in one of my larger projects. I know, tsk tsk. I do use Perl at work on admittedly rather menial stuff day in day out though. Anyhoo...

Long story short I'm using Curl in PHP to do the following:
Slurp -> Find Link to Login page, and follow -> Find login form and follow -> Reslurp original page (but logged in).
This worked fine and dandy until a change on the server side, which I have determined now checks for Javascript and forces a Captcha in the case that it is disabled. If I disable javascript in any single step of the above sequence in a browser, the Captcha is forced. I'm using HttpFox to look at the packets, and it seems that cookies are written in a pretty standard fashion. (I get two in response to the first slurp, which uses GET). In a browser w/ JavaScript enabled, I get another 5 or so after I follow the login form. The headers being sent are identical in the browser & the Curl script, but Curl ignores the javascripts of course. I know the magic is somehow set in either a <script> tag or a <noscript> tag. If Javascript is enabled I get a very non-trivial script, plus about 5 cookies. I don't know if it does anything but it can't be ignored. It's 189k, and relatively daunting. When I follow the login form w/ my Curl PHP script (w/ JS obviously unavailable) the scripts are ignored, I get no cookies, and the captcha appears. So, I'm now weighing my options.

*A long time ago I did something similar with WWW::Mechanize, and I'm not totally opposed to doing it now. I see there is a JavaScript plugin (I think this is relatively new). I'm curious as to how it works though. Can I be somewhat sure that the server side will assume I'm a browser w/ JS enabled if I use the plugin?

*How could the server side be internally storing whether I am using Javascript or not? I assume a JavaScript the browser has executed could access some URL which would then store whether I'm a browser or a scraper.

*Any other one I'm not thinking of?

Cheers for any advice!

In reply to Mechanize, Javascript, Cookies, and you! by GaijinPunch

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