Using an existing session to grab a page

[Chad Layton]

I'm rather new to both web programming and ruby so forgive me if my
question is ill formed.

I'm trying to do some screen scraping on a website that requires a login
. What I would like to have happen is for the user to login to the
website normally, then run my script which uses the existing login
session to grab the page and do whatever to it.

To illustrate my problem: If I use
Net::HTTP.get_response(URI.parse("http://foo.bar/baz.php")).body, then
it serves up the index asking for a login. How do I get contents of
baz.php?

[James Britt]

I suspect that the user agent (i.e., the code, as opposed to a browser)
needs to include site cookies in the request headers.

After you sign in using a browser, you'll need to find the cookie left
by the site, or inspect a session cookie if the browser is not writing
it to disk. Most browsers have a way to show cookies sent by a site.

James

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[Jim]

Don't if this'll help, but www-mechanize is able to login to a site
that is using a html form to login.

You don't need to use a browser at all.

http://www.ntecs.de/blog/Blog/WWW-Mechanize.rdoc

[Chad Layton]

James Britt wrote:
> Chad Layton wrote:
>
>> I'm rather new to both web programming and ruby so forgive me if my
>> question is ill formed.
>>
>> I'm trying to do some screen scraping on a website that requires a
>> login . What I would like to have happen is for the user to login to
>> the website normally, then run my script which uses the existing login
>> session to grab the page and do whatever to it.
>>
>> To illustrate my problem: If I use
>> Net::HTTP.get_response(URI.parse("http://foo.bar/baz.php")).body, then
>> it serves up the index asking for a login. How do I get contents of
>> baz.php?
>
>
> I suspect that the user agent (i.e., the code, as opposed to a browser)
> needs to include site cookies in the request headers.
>
> After you sign in using a browser, you'll need to find the cookie left
> by the site, or inspect a session cookie if the browser is not writing
> it to disk. Most browsers have a way to show cookies sent by a site.
>
>
>
> James
>
>

Thank you, James. I see that when I login to the site 4 cookies are set,
how would I include them in the request headers?

[James Britt]

I *think* you pass a hash into the Net::HTTP initializer, or perhaps as
a parameter to 'get' but I can't find docs or examples to prove this.