web scraping to fill out (and retrieve) search forms?

Question

I was wondering if it is possible to \"automate\" the task of typing in entries to search forms and extracting matches from the results. For instance, I have a list of journ

Answer 1

Beautiful Soup is great for parsing webpages- that's half of what you want to do. Python, Perl, and Ruby all have a version of Mechanize, and that's the other half:

http://wwwsearch.sourceforge.net/mechanize/

Mechanize let's you control a browser:

# Follow a link
browser.follow_link(link_node)

# Submit a form
browser.select_form(name="search")
browser["authors"] = ["author #1", "author #2"]
browser["volume"] = "any"
search_response = br.submit()

With Mechanize and Beautiful Soup you have a great start. One extra tool I'd consider is Firebug, as used in this quick ruby scraping guide:

http://www.igvita.com/2007/02/04/ruby-screen-scraper-in-60-seconds/

Firebug can speed your construction of xpaths for parsing documents, saving you some serious time.

Good luck!