If Betfair allows bots, most likely they also have some documents about how they expect bots to talk to their computers. Before trying to automate a browser and simulate a user, I would look at what direct methods they offer, as usually these are far more convenient ways than to extract information intended for humans from pages that may change.

If, on the other hand, you do not want your programs to be recognized as programs, you can try to simulate a human (or a browser, potentially controlled by a human) by using a module in the Mechanize family of programs, or Web::Magic, Web::Scraper or Mojolicious. The term you might want to search for is "web scraping" or "screen scraping".


In reply to Re: Perl Online Bot by Corion
in thread Perl Online Bot by bennierounder

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.