Hello monks,

Anyone have a preferred way to query a website using CGI?
Or perhaps can recommend a tutorial?

For example, I want to search multiple on-line websites for information about a specific gene, obtained from a user input form:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title> Basic Web Form </title> </head> <body> <h1> Basic Web Form Example </h1> <p> Please enter a gene name and click 'Search' to get a report of informa +tion for a gene. </p> <form action="/cgi-bin/gene_query.pl" method="get"> <p> Gene: <input type="text" name="gene" size="15" /> <input type="submit" value="Search" /> <input type="reset" value="Clear" /> </p> </form> </body> </html>

In gene_query.pl what is the best technique to search (for example), a website like Pubmed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/) for all articles involving $gene?

These websites I assume have SQL databases as the back-end. Does one need to construct an SQL query for the db?

Thanks in advance for any pointers in the right direction.


In reply to CGI to query other websites by Shuraski

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