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Judge_Fang

Perl For Automated Web Form Search

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Hi all,I'd like to write a script to automate a search in order to collect data from an online database. The database is an archive of newspaper articles. The search is for certain words/text. It is searchable via a form only. The rub is that only a small portion (a month) at a time is searchable. I need to search every day for 50 years or so. Manually, this would take a considerable amount of time.I'm thinking of using perl or ruby or something similar. I am an absolute beginner with scripting and haven't done much formal learning in the subject since a pascal course many years ago in college. Of course I could just pay someone to do it, but i'd like to learn some basic scripting as I can envisage needing to do similar things quite regularly in the future.Is this feasible? Any ideas on the most efficient way to go about it? What do i need to learn in order to have a go at it? Any thoughts, tips, pointers would be greatly appreciated. Cheers

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Well, I guess PERL would be the best choice for such searches, RegEx is a quite powerfull tool... You can connect to MySQL databases from PERL, so that shouldn't be a problem either... You should concentrate on connecting to databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, and others) in PERL, and also Regular Expressions... RegEx will be your best friend in searches for news articles...

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