From: Chuck Dawit <chuckdawit@...>
Date: 2007-09-20T14:36:57+09:00
Subject: Re: scraping web pages for cisco products

unknown wrote:
>> With this method do I need to know the name of the form to use it? With
>> mechanize I thought you had to look at the form name first before you
>> could use it?
> 
> It helps to know someway to distinguish the form you're looking for
> from the other forms on the page.  It would be possible to iterate
> through all the forms on a page, entering some text into the text
> fields in the form and submitting them; but, most of the time the
> script would probably be in either the wrong form or the wrong field
> in the right form (and, of course, there are other issues, e.g. forms
> that require multiple fields to be edited).  I don't see anyway to
> avoid customizing the code for each site (though, if you get a good
> framework built the effort per site should decrease?).

I agree but I have around 2000 sites to look at and I can't look at each 
and every form, that would take way to long. Do you think a better 
approach would be to use a search engines API to search for the products 
on each site? I've never used any search engine API, if I know the 
website name and the product name and a price I want can I use those 
parameters in the search to find results?
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