Screen Scrapping

[Anna]

Hi: This is the site which gives information about social security
Death index search. Is there any way i can pass the social number
directly thru Perl program in the web site and get the three records
Name, Birth, Death in my computer. I heard some thing about screen
scrapping but no idea how to i use it
http://ssdi.rootsweb.com/

Thanks.

 

[Mirco Wahab]

Hi: This is the site which gives information about social security
Death index search. Is there any way i can pass the social number
directly thru Perl program in the web site and get the three records
Name, Birth, Death in my computer. I heard some thing about screen
scrapping but no idea how to i use it
http://ssdi.rootsweb.com/

This sound like a question for
a programmers job assignement.

Added: "you have ten minutes from now" ;-)

You could simply pull the stuff by LWP::UserAgent
and parse the resulting HTML response, like
(quick & dirty):


use strict;
use warnings;
use LWP::UserAgent;

my %lookup = (
firstname => 'George', middlename => 'W', lastname => 'Bush',
ssn =>'', nt => 'exact', stat => ''
);

my $url = 'ssdi.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/ssdi.cgi';
my $rgx = qr{^<tr><td>(.*?)</td><td>(.*?)</td><td>(.*?)</td><td>(.*?)</td></tr>$};
my $uag = LWP::UserAgent->new( agent=>'MSIE/6.0' );
my @TxT = map { /$rgx/ ? [$1, $2, $3] : () } split /\n/,
$uag->post('http://'.$url, \%lookup)->as_string;

# stuff is now in $_->[0], $_->[1],$_->[2],
print "@$_\n", for @TxT;



Just enter the search term in %lookup and
parse the response fields.

Regards

Mirco

 

[Tad McClellan]

Hi: This is the site which gives information about social security
Death index search. Is there any way i can pass the social number
directly thru Perl program in the web site and get the three records
Name, Birth, Death in my computer. I heard some thing about screen
scrapping but no idea how to i use it
http://ssdi.rootsweb.com/

Start with the FAQ answer to your question:

How do I automate an HTML form submission?