PHP Automation (clicks etc.)

Question

Hello everyone, I'm just wondering if it's possible to do some automation with php, I.E. going to the href value of id="alinktonextpage", or filling in the values of the form and submitting it.

All this would be not be on my website.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Try Selenium

Selenium is a suite of tools to automate web app testing across many platforms.

Selenium...

• runs in many browsers and operating systems
• can be controlled by many programming languages and testing frameworks.

If you just want to submit data to a remote address, cURL is the better choice.
If you just want to parse HTML, consider using DOM.

With that said, you might want to be more specific about your UseCase, so we know what you're up to.

Answer 2

Forms and forms of authentication can be done using the cURL library:

http://uk2.php.net/manual/en/book.curl.php

For parsing out URLs from a page I suggest first grabbing the page using cURL and then just parse it using the built in PHP string functions, or with a HTML parsing library.

Answer 3

you could use Snoopy (sort of a browser in php) and submit forms or parse the html for links or whatever via a php cli script.