Thread: Can you do this?

  1. #1
    Registered User Fool's Avatar
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    Can you do this?

    I friend of mine is looking for a car. He goes to all these sites and types in the car, years, colors and whatever in Internet Explorer. He wants to know if you can create a Macro or a program that will do all of this for him. If you can't tell, he's pretty lazy I kind of understand it though because he goes to about ten different sites. So could anyone do this for him?

    -Fool

  2. #2
    &TH of undefined behavior Fordy's Avatar
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    Each form on a website works to different parameters. For example if I fill in Volkswagon in the car box, 1999 in the year box and blue in the color box, then the URL sent back to the web server might be;

    Code:
    http://www.buycars.com/path?car=Volkswagon&year=1999&col=blue
    This would then send back the result based on the search capability for that site. If I typed in these results on another site, the parameters in the URL would be different. Another site may define the car parameter as vehicle or item or whatever...

    For what you are proposing, the search parameters would have to be the same for each and every car buying site he visits. This is not that realistic.

  3. #3
    Registered User Fool's Avatar
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    Oh ok, I'll tell him. Thanks for the reply!

    -Fool

  4. #4
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    Just parse the HTML form file, and generate the name=value pairs for each site. What you want to do from there depends on you--you could write a javascript program to put in one at a time and display the output, while the guy either reads or saves it, you could use "wget -R -l2 URL"(I think. I don't use this command very often) to download the page and images onto the computer.
    All generalizations are false

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