Question

I have been trying to write a script that may help me to comment from command line.(The sole reason why I want to do this is its vacation time here and I want to kill time).
I often visit and post on this site.So I am starting with this site only.
For example to comment on this post I used the following script

require "uri"
require 'net/http'


def comment()
    response =  Net::HTTP.post_form(URI.parse("http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/wp-comments-post.php"),{'author'=>"pikachu",'email'=>"[e-mail]",'url'=>"geekinessthecoolway.blogspot.com",'submit'=>"Have Your Say",'comment_post_ID'=>"18215",'comment_parent'=>"0",'akismet_comment_nonce'=>"70e83407c8",'bb2_screener_'=>"1330701851 117.199.148.101",'comment'=>"How can we generalize this for a n-ary tree?"})
    return response.body
    end
puts comment()

Obviously the values were not hardcoded but for sake of clearity and maintaining the objective of the post i am hardcoding them.
Beside the regular fields that appear on the form,the values for the hidden fields i found out from wireshark when i posted a comment the normal way.I can’t figure out what I am missing?May be some js event?

Edit:
As few people suggested using mechanize I switched to python.Now my updated code looks like:

import sys
import mechanize
uri = "http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/"
request = mechanize.Request(mechanize.urljoin(uri, "archives/18215"))
response = mechanize.urlopen(request)
forms = mechanize.ParseResponse(response, backwards_compat=False)
response.close()
form=forms[0]
print form
control = form.find_control("comment")
#control=form.find_control("bb2_screener")
print control.disabled
#  ...or readonly
print control.readonly
#  readonly and disabled attributes can be assigned to
#control.disabled = False
form.set_all_readonly(False)
form["author"]="Bulbasaur"
form["email"]="[e-mail]"
form["url"]="9gag.com"
form["comment"]="Y u no put a captcha?"
form["submit"]="Have Your Say"
form["comment_post_ID"]="18215"
form["comment_parent"]="0"
form["akismet_comment_nonce"]="d48e588090"
#form["bb2_screener_"]="1330787192 117.199.144.174"
request2 = form.click() 
print request2
try:
    response2 = mechanize.urlopen(request2)
except mechanize.HTTPError, response2:
    pass
# headers
for name, value in response2.info().items():
    if name != "date":
        print "%s: %s" % (name.title(), value)
print response2.read()  # body
response2.close()    

Now the server returns me this.On going through the html code of the original page i found out there is one more field bb2_screener that i need to fill if I want to pretend like a browser to the server.But the problem is the field is not written inside the tag so mechanize won’t treat it as a field.

Answer 1

Assuming you have all the params correct, you’re still missing the session information that the site stores in a cookie. Consider using something like mechanize, that’ll deal with the cookies for you. It’s also more natural in that you tell it which fields to fill in with which data. If that still doesn’t work, you can always use a jackhammer like selenium, but then technically you’re using a browser.