From: Ryan Leavengood <leavengood@...>
Date: 2007-06-27T06:52:38+09:00
Subject: Re: Following a Javascript Link Using Mechanize

On 6/26/07, Matt White <whiteqt@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> If I try to "click" the link, Mechanize raises an "unsupported scheme"
> exception. At this point I am using all sorts of fun regular
> expressions to parse the Javascript and send the appropriate values to
> the page with a WWW::Mechanize.post call. Is there an easier way?
> Thanks.

This would require Mechanize to have a Javascript interpreter. In
theory this is possible (there are several open source Javascript
interpreters), but for most cases this is a bit of overkill. Of course
with all the AJAX sites these days it might not be a terrible idea.

In addition the HTML parser might need to be better and would need to
provide a DOM interface for the Javascript to use.

Either way it is a big complicated project, and I doubt something the
Mechanize maintainer would want to implement. If you REALLY want to
look into this I would recommend taking a look at the WebKit
(www.webkit.org) Javascript interpreter, it seems to be pretty
self-contained and quite fast.

Ryan