Which programming language to automate web browser use?

[Human_doing]

Hi all,

I wonder if anyone could please advise what would be the best programming language/program to learn if I wanted to do things like create apps that opened a web browser, accessed a URL, automatically selected pre-defined options on drop down menus/radio buttons, automatically clicked buttons on web forms to move to different pages etc.? I'm assuming that even if VBA can do this, it isn't the most professional or efficient way of doing so?

Thanks

 

[xenou]

You can automate IE to do these thing - somewhat of a rare talent on this board but we see examples regularly enough. Once at a web page you can navigate the DOM to dig into it's components and behaviors and interact with them. Try searching under automate internet explorer vba. Same should be possible for Firefox but I've not seen examples here. Perhaps try browsing the Firefox development addins, or Opera developer addins for tools in this regard (I think GreaseMonkey might be such a tool for Firefox). No doubt JavaScript is adept at this kind of thing, but I'm really not able to say for sure as I'm no good with JS - nevertheless, it just seems to be a natural fit for working with browsers.

I would imagine that if you want to go all the way there is an entire field of work called Web Scraping dedicated to this kind of thing. I'm sure there's some books on it and so forth.

 

[Human_doing]

Thanks for getting back to me, I will look in to this,

Thanks!

 

[maxlang]

I have used Perl for this. Check out the LWP module and maybe the best module Mechanize. There are may examples of code on the net and active Perl news groups.