waoverholt has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello Monks,

I am a relatively new perl user (still very much the beginner) and I am working on a script to interface with a website (http://linux1.softberry.com/berry.phtml?topic=fgenesb&group=programs&subgroup=gfindb).

Essentially I would like to upload a local file to that form, select a different "closest organism", hit "Process", and then download the resulting textfile to my computer.

Running the code:

 $mech->dump_forms();

seems to work at finding those forms but I'm not quite sure how to navigate the fields. Here is what I have so far. Obviously incomplete for the task, but even the first checks fail.

Thanks for taking the time to read this and any advice would be greatly appreciated.

- waoverholt

use warnings; use strict; use WWW::Mechanize; my $genome_file = $ARGV[0]; my $agent = WWW::Mechanize->new(); my $url = "http://linux1.softberry.com/berry.phtml?topic=fgenesb&group +=programs&subgroup=gfindb"; my $results = $agent->get($url); die "GET failed" unless $results->is_success; #$agent->dump_forms(); my $form1 = $agent->form_name("FILE"); die unless $form1->success; my $form1_info = $agent->field("FILE", $genome_file); die unless $form +1_info->is_success; $agent->select(); $agent->form_name('org'); $agent->field("option", "ARCHAE BACTERIAL generic"); $agent->click(); $agent->form_name('Process');