Submitting automatic form

Mucello

I have been working on a project where I need to scrape weather data from a website. The data that I want are only available after a form is submitted. What is the best way to automatically submit a form to another website and parse the results? Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

P.S. We're running PHP5

sneakyimp

Try reading up on [man]curl[/man]. A quick google search for "php curl example" yielded this page:

http://blog.mypapit.net/2006/02/sending-http-post-with-php-curl.html

Of course, that other form may require GET instead of POST (you'll have to read the html source code to see what the form method is). In that case, you'll just need to append your variables to the url which handles the form action.

m_tt

cURL would work, but I would go with AJAX...

sneakyimp

If cURL is installed, I would imagine it's a bit less work if you are trying to scrape the page and load it into a database because you don't have to write all the Javascript to access two different pages on top of the PHP you need to store the data. You also can set it up to run without having to have a browser open somewhere.

If your PHP machine doesn't have cURL installed or it is perhaps blocked by a firewall or something, then AJAX is a good workaround.