Hello Perl Monks,

I was trying to scrap data from the following website: http://web1.ncaa.org/stats/StatsSrv/careersearch and am getting the following message on 2 of 3 selection fields: "Input 'field x' not found..."

I am confused why it is apparently working for 1 field, but not the other 2. (I didn't paste the page source data since it was probably too large.) The site does navigate using Javascript. I hear that Java-based can be difficult to scrape using Perl. Should I try some other method?

My code is below: 

use strict;
use warnings;
use WWW::Mechanize;
my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();
my $outfile = "testNCAAdata.txt";
open(OUTFILE, ">$outfile");
my $url = "http://web1.ncaa.org/stats/StatsSrv/careersearch";
$mech->get($url);
$mech->select('searchOrg','328');
$mech->select('academicYear','2009');
$mech->select('searchSport','MBB');
$mech->click();
$mech->click('submit',[0,1]);
$mech->get($url);
my $output_page = $mech->content();
print OUTFILE "$output_page";
close(OUTFILE);

[download]

I really appreciate any help you guys can offer. Thanks

In reply to WWW::Mechanize "Input not found" by ScottJohn

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.