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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?

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  • As you used the web-apps tag, you are only looking for web apps? Hosted and/or self-hosted?
    – unor
    Sep 6, 2014 at 15:54
  • I dont mind if its web or machine based, app or script, hosted or self hosted, I am flexable
    – wildWill
    Sep 6, 2014 at 16:13
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    Okay. If it’s a local solution, does the OS matter? Price?
    – unor
    Sep 6, 2014 at 16:15
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    prefurably linux or OSX. Open source if possible, if not then 50USD or less.
    – wildWill
    Sep 6, 2014 at 21:43

1 Answer 1

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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.
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    No need to use the heavy Scrapy if you just need to parse the page. Use BeautifulSoup instead which only provides HTML parsing.
    – user111
    Sep 8, 2014 at 14:43
  • Thanks @AndréDaniel - I have added BeautifulSoup into the answer as it is a good option. Sep 8, 2014 at 17:41

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