Hello, I am not really a programmer, but can write perl/tcl/c\++, and so on.
My task is to automate logging on to a few httpS websites (cookies, redirects and all), and to scrape the screens, putting the data (lots of it) into a excel spreadsheet. Automating the spreadsheet manipulation of the data, and then putting the resultant data back on a site through mimicking a human user's interaction with a site.

I have been researching the tools to do that, and am finally completely confused:
I tried perl LWP/Mechanize, and got stuck after one of the pages i need to talk to says my browser does not support javascript and cascading frames.
I then thought that a better way to do the job would be to automate IE itself since I know it is supported, plus I can see what's going on.

I now found a bunch of tools similar to samie, and my question really is what is the right tool for the job? Do i not know enough about perl to make it work with JavaScript, why not use VB to automate IE (a lot of people seem to be doing that), and can perl let me pull up excel, and run macros in it like VB would.

I know this is alot of questions (reflecting of my state of confusion) but any comments are much appreciated, thanks in advance...

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.