"If the site doesn't like what your script is doing when you're signed in, they can let you know. I really would like to work up this example, but with WMC instead. My partner and I will watch Netflix, HBO, Amazon, and we're always trying to match the actors up to where we've seen them last, so I will get on my android and make the actual keystrokes on other occasions."

Have you looked at the many utilities on cpan for scraping data from IMDB? While packages exist here is a short proof of concept for accessing data, just a short (sub optimal) example to get you started:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use feature 'say';
use Mojo::URL;
use Mojo::Util qw(trim);
use Mojo::UserAgent;

my $imdburl = 'http://www.imdb.com/search/title?title=Caddyshack';

# pretend to be a browser
my $uaname = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (
+KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/40.0.2214.93 Safari/537.36';

my $ua = Mojo::UserAgent->new;
$ua->max_redirects(5)->connect_timeout(20)->request_timeout(20);
$ua->transactor->name( $uaname );

# find search results
my $dom = $ua->get( $imdburl )->res->dom;

# assume first match
my $filmurl = $dom->find('a[href^=/title]')->first->attr('href');

# extract film id
my $filmid  = Mojo::URL->new( $filmurl )->path->parts->[-1];

# get details of film
$dom = $ua->get( "https://www.imdb.com/title/$filmid/" )->res->dom;

# print film details
say trim( $dom->at('div.title_wrapper > h1')->text ) . ' (' . trim( $d
+om->at('#titleYear > a')->text ) .')';

# print actor/character names
foreach my $cast ( $dom->find('table.cast_list > tr:not(:first-child)'
+)->each ){
  say trim ($cast->at('td:nth-of-type(2) > a')->text ) . ' as ' . trim
+ ( $cast->at('td.character')->all_text );
}
[download]

Output:

Caddyshack (1980)
Chevy Chase as Ty Webb
Rodney Dangerfield as Al Czervik
Ted Knight as Judge Elihu Smails
Michael O'Keefe as Danny Noonan
Bill Murray as Carl Spackler
Sarah Holcomb as Maggie O'Hooligan
Scott Colomby as Tony D'Annunzio
Cindy Morgan as Lacey Underall
Dan Resin as Dr. Beeper
Henry Wilcoxon as The Bishop
Elaine Aiken as Mrs. Noonan
Albert Salmi as Mr. Noonan
Ann Ryerson as Grace
Brian Doyle-Murray as Lou Loomis
Hamilton Mitchell as Motormouth
[download]

See also Mojo::UserAgent, Mojo::DOM, Mojo::URL, ojo (should you want one liners). You could adapt the above to print all matches and prompt for which one you want, rather than assume the first one (since remakes, sequels/prequels etc..), allow you to select the actor and return the details of all the other films/shows they have been in.

Update: If you would prefer some sort of web interface to the results wrap the above around Mojolicious::Lite

marto, thx for your reply...your script works right out of the gate. I believe that this is the second time I've followed Mojo:: based scripts you've posted, finding them useful in both circumstances. Also thanks for the tip to have a gander on cpan. It was interesting for me to look at the source, and clearly, if I wanted to pursue IMDB further, that would be the route.

Let me tell you why I would like to shift away from IMDB. It's that when I save the dom file to disc, it's 2.2 megs, which is nowhere near what I can lay eyes on and understand. Machines get it with the help of javascript, but I am only intermediate at best in my understanding of any of the matters I am writing about now.

I spent some time looking at Mojo:: beginning with:

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use Mojolicious::Lite;
 
get '/' => sub {
  my $c = shift;
  $c->render(text => 'Hello World!');
};
 
app->start;
__END__
[download]

I'm not sure what it all means, but it seems to work and indicate that I have the capabilities I might expect.

$ ./1.mojo.pl daemon
[2020-04-25 19:20:12.17317] [2970] [info] Listening at "http://*:3000"
Server available at http://127.0.0.1:3000
^C$
[download]

I had a bit of aha moment when comparing the logs for WMC:

2020/04/29 14:29:32 DEBUG Connecting to ws://127.0.0.1:37749/devtools/browser/58619c4b-5292-4d3a-a0f7-6b69c01c73dc

I don't know how to understand code short of working it and seeing the outcome. So I fiddle around with the examples I can work and then try to re-train the script on a different target, a smaller one that I might be able to understand and that furthers my goals with what I want to do for web automation.

If you would prefer some sort of web interface to the results wrap the above around Mojolicious::Lite

I'm hoping that I can get an event clicked on this page maybe with the Mojo:: family of tools. It's the site I've always gone to for ephemeral data and is further set for Portland, OR. I'm looking to get the radio button for julian day pressed and the value for jd populated by:

my $julian_day = 2458960;

, updated, and then I want to extract all the values from the table, but with a particular emphasis on getting whether the Sun is up or not at that precise time.

Corion and I have been trying to crack this with WMC, and we're not quite there. Here's how this button looks when I ask google chrome's inspector about it:

<c>full XPath: /html/body/form/center/table/tbody/tr[1]/td/table/tbody
+/tr[3]/td[1]/input

selector: body > form > center > table > tbody > tr:nth-child(1) > td 
+> table > tbody > tr:nth-child(3) > td:nth-child(1) > a

XPath:      /html/body/form/center/table/tbody/tr[1]/td/table/tbody/tr
+[3]/td[1]/a

JSPath: document.querySelector("body > form > center > table > tbody >
+ tr:nth-child(1) > td > table > tbody > tr:nth-child(3) > td:nth-chil
+d(1) > a")
[download]

Another representation. I think this is what the DOM looks like after data dumped:

[
                                    "tag",
                                    "input",
                                    { name => "date", onclick => 0, ty
+pe => "radio", value => 2 },
                                    'fix',
                                  ],
                                  ["text", " ", 'fix'],
                                  [
                                    "tag",
                                    "a",
                                    { href => "/yoursky/help/controls.
+html#Julian" },
                                    'fix',
                                    ["text", "Julian day:", 'fix'],
                                  ],
                                  ["text", "\n", 'fix'],
                                ],
                                ["text", "\n", 'fix'],
                                [
                                  "tag",
                                  "td",
                                  {},
                                  'fix',
                                  ["text", "\n", 'fix'],
                                  [
                                    "tag",
                                    "input",
                                    {
                                      name     => "jd",
                                      onchange => "document.request.da
+te[2].checked=true;",
                                      size     => 20,
                                      type     => "text",
                                      value    => 2458963.36684,
                                    },
[download]

Put simply, can Mojolicious do this?

"Let me tell you why I would like to shift away from IMDB. It's that when I save the dom file to disc, it's 2.2 megs, which is nowhere near what I can lay eyes on and understand. Machines get it with the help of javascript, but I am only intermediate at best in my understanding of any of the matters I am writing about now."

One of the nice things about Mojo::DOM is the support for CSS Selectors (see the Mojo docs section Learning Web Technologies). You don;t have to figure these out for yourself, you can use your browsers 'developer tools' GUI to click on things and copy their CSS selector/path. Searching for a tutorial for whatever browser you use should produce many videos/tutorials demoing this sort of thing. The selectors aren't always optimal, just looking at the HTML source can often point to much shorter selectors in many cases. Mojo::UserAgent makes it fairly simple to send data to web interfaces, and the return object contains the resulting DOM (->res->dom above) which you can then use to display/capture whatever data you like. Give it a shot and let me know if you have any problems.