Parsing password protected html

[random1]

I am looking for suggestions. Just point me in the right direction.

I am trying to access a web page that is behind a password protected entry. I have the passwords and all but i want to use php to enter the username/password and return the data i need.

The entry is a standard html form front end with cold fusion back end.

I would appreciate any suggestions.

[edit]Is there a way to format a url to pass the password and username?[/edit]

[cboston]

If your code is on a unix/linux system you can use a system call to run wget. wget will pull an html page and write it to a file on your system and then you can parse it. wget has built in function for sending a username and password.

You can get WGET here

Chris Boston

[random1]

unfortunatley my php is hosted by a third party web host. at least for now it is and i don't know if wget is part of the install.

[random1]

Any other ideas or methods?

[jayant]

use:

$contents=fopen("http://username:[e-mail]/test/index.php");

you can always use fsockopen() to achieve this.

simple ... eh 😉

[random1]

I have tried using the method...

$contents=fopen("http://username: [e-mail]/test/index.php");

but it doesn't work.

it might be because it is a httpS :// but i'm not sure of that.

The username/password form uses the post method. Could that be the cause?

don't know for sure what file that i need to submit the data to. I'm pretty sure it is called "logon_proc.cfm".

the source code html has this line... "<form name="logon" method="post" action="logon_proc.cfm">
"

example:$contents=fopen("http://username: [e-mail]/logon_proc.cfm");
does not work 🙁

What i actually want to do is get past the password page and retrieve data from a number of protected pages.

Thanks.
i'm gonna try playing with the fsockopen().

[jayant]

1) fopen does not support https. read its documention.
2) the url format given, is for http-authentication, and not of submittting forms.

For submitting data to from via GET simplly give:

fopen("http://www.somesite.com/index.php?var1=val1&var2=val2&submit=go!");

[MrAlaska]

This is one of those "there has got to be a way' things that I have not run across a method yet. As already mentioned, passing the data on a GET request is simple. I have never worked with CF, but I assume it looks for the method when it collects the variables, or it might not. You can try the URL method.

To send on a post you could have PHP build a page with the form fields populated, then have a javascript onload=form.submit() type of thing. Kind of klunky but might do the trick depending on how tight security is. If I had a site with property worth protecting, I would be checking for the referrer before I accepted a log in.

[random1]

The site i'm trying to connect to does log referer. any failed attempts to log in alert an admin. after the first two attempts i got a call from an admin. He was pretty mad but i smoothed it over and explained what and why i am trying to do.

Once logged in all the information is available with "get".

I am looking at cURL because of someones suggestion. I have no idea if it will work or not. never used it before.

this is how it currently works...

The company that i contract with has 85% of it's work with us offline (Snail mail work orders and product/client information). The information is entered manually. The remaining 15% is online and has to be collected from the "interactive online" system (still entered inot our DB manually).

This is how i want it to work...

My server (Linux with Apache/php/MySQL) will log on, collect the new information and combined in with my offline database. Eventually the information will all be available online and my system will take over data collection entirely.

Thanks again for the help. 🙂