Check a web page and send an email when a change is detected

Question

I have a need to be able to automate the following:

1. Submit a webform (login)
2. Check the next page for given text (it’s a date)
3. Send an email (if date has changed)

I have found a few page watches but I have not found any yet that have the ability to login and then assert a string on a page.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

You could do this with python and mechanize to fill in & submit the form, possibly plus possibly scrapy or BeautifulSoup to parse the resulting 2nd page. You can then use the supplied stmplib to create and send the required email on a change of the important items from what you stored in the previous run.

• Free, most Linux machines will already have python installed
• Flexible, e.g. you can look at changes in specific items on the results page
• If necessary you can go through several pages to get to the one you are "watching" for changes, e.g. log in, fill in a form, submit then check the quote details for changes from the last time.