script to click a link at a certain time

Question

I am interested in writing a script that goes to a website and clicks a link at a certain time. How do I go about doing something like this?

Answer 1

Are you familiar with cURL?

Answer 2

You should use selenium http://seleniumhq.org/ You can control it using anyone of the language you specified in the tags.

You can start to browse from http://seleniumhq.org/projects/remote-control/

Answer 3

"clicking a link" could have two meanings:

Actually clicking the link in a browser, or just doing an HTTP GET that would result from it. This could be as simple as software that runs on your desktop and simulates a click at a certain point, to something as complicated as Selenium for automation of website interactions.

If you just need to do the GET request that clicking the link would do, anything would do. Unix systems typically include wget and curl, which take a url to request. Or if you want to process the data, you can do this in most programming languages. For example, in python you could do urllib2.urlopen('http://stackoverflow.com') and then do whatever you want with the data. Perl has an equivalent.