How can I automate an existing instance of Internet Explorer using Perl?

Question

I am struggling to get control of an IE preview control which is 'Internet Explorer_Server' class on an external windows application with perl.

Internet Explorer_Server is the class name of the window, I've found it with Spy++. and here’s my assertion code of it

$className = Win32::GUI::GetClassName($window); 
if ($className eq "Internet Explorer_Server") { 
    ... 
}

I can get a handle of that 'Internet Explorer_Server' with Win32::GUI::GetWindow, but have no idea what to do next.

Answer 1

Updated: You are going down the wrong path. What you need is Win32::OLE.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use Win32::OLE;
$Win32::OLE::Warn = 3;

my $shell = get_shell();
my $windows = $shell->Windows;

my $count = $windows->{Count};

for my $item ( 1 .. $count ) {
    my $window = $windows->Item( $item );
    my $doc = $window->{Document};
    next unless $doc;
    print $doc->{body}->innerHTML;
}

sub get_shell {
    my $shell;
    eval {
        $shell = Win32::OLE->GetActiveObject('Shell.Application');
    };

    die "$@\n" if $@;

    return $shell if defined $shell;

    $shell = Win32::OLE->new('Shell.Application')
        or die "Cannot get Shell.Application: ",
               Win32::OLE->LastError, "\n";
}
__END__

So, this code finds a window with a Document property and prints the HTML. You will have to decide on what criteria you want to use to find the window you are interested in.

ShellWindows documentation.

Answer 2

Have you looked at Samie http://samie.sourceforge.net/ as this is a perl module to control IE

Answer 3

You may want to have a look at Win32::IE::Mechanize. I am not sure whether you can control an existing IE window with this module, but accessing a single URL should be possible in about five lines of code.