[lug] Help on scripting interactions with a web site

[Walter Pienciak]

On Tue, 18 Sep 2001, Ken Kinder wrote:

> Plenty of people have already posted about using Python or Perl, and
> what libraries to use. I have one more suggestion. When debugging stuff
> like this, it's sometimes hard to figure out EXACTLY what the webserver
> and webbrowser are sending back and forth. When I can't get my script to
> emulate the actions of a browser and I'm not sure what the difference
> is, I do a tcpdump (see the man page) on port 80, and diff the data.
>
> Works every time. Sometimes there are obscure differences.

Good point.  If you go the Perl route,

use LWP::Debug qw(+);

will spit out lots of interesting things.

Walter