Question

I have this code in Python that was quite simple to do with mechanize to just go into a URL and click the submit button:

from mechanize import ParseResponse, urlopen, urljoin

response = urlopen("http://www.somesite.com/somepage")
forms = ParseResponse(response, backwards_compat=False)
form = forms[0]

print urlopen(form.click()).read()

Now the question is: Is there any library/simple method to do this in Objective-C?

I’ve seen some more or less of similar examples with NSURL that where quite big, but since I’ll be doing this to a bunch of diferent sites, it doesn’t look like a simple thing to go torugh some dozens of code lines to each one of them and debug everything if there is some easy way like with mechanize.

Regards,
Bruno

Answer 1

Check this site: http://allseeing-i.com/ASIHTTPRequest/
It is not actually what you want, but you can send the POST/GET values to the form action page.

if you have a page http://test.com/form.php with following form:

<form name="login" method="POST" action="action.php">
    <input name="username"><br />
    <input name="password"><br>
    <input type="submit">
</form>

you can use this code, to perform this form.

NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:@"http://test.com/action.php];
ASIFormDataRequest *request = [[[ASIFormDataRequest alloc] initWithURL:url] autorelease];
[request setPostValue:@"Admin" forKey:@"username"];
[request setPostValue:@"1234" forKey:@"password"];
[request startSynchronous];