So a quick update, to help anyone looking for a similar solution.

I have a working scraper bot now, which handles the info in the AJAX/JS pop-up. I've had to resort to sniffing the HTTP with tools/browser plug-ins. I then mimic the HTTP POSTs that went over the wire using HTTP::Request::Common. This was the solution I was trying to avoid (as discussed above in this thread), primarily because if a bot needs to be more autonomous than mine, such as crawling, a more programmatic / self-contained solution is preferred. This is what I was trying to explain to Anonymous Monk. I tried several modules and ways to do that without success. But I should note to those who want to try, that I did not exhaust trying all routes that had potential, so more work with something like WWW::Mechanize::Firefox could possibly be fruitful.

If your scraper is specific to a stable site or does not need to be an autonomous crawler, I would recommend to just cheat the complexity and sniff / mimic the HTTP as described in this thread.

In reply to Re^10: Scraping Ajax / JS pop-up by Monk-E
in thread Scraping Ajax / JS pop-up by Monk-E

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.