Question

i’m building a program to take information from one webpage and enter it into another, parsing the original page for the information isn’t a problem, but I have no idea how to get that information from the text file and into the text fields of a different website using a script. Google isn’t helping, so can this be done with java?

Answer 1

If the question is how to submit a form programmatically in Java, I would suggest to look at Apache HTTP Components Client, a class library that does all the hard work for you.

The documentation is very good so I suggest you first read at least their tutorial, but here’s a small code fragment I borrowed from their website that shows how to POST a form with variables user and password

PostMethod post = new PostMethod("http://jakarata.apache.org/");
NameValuePair[] data = {
  new NameValuePair("user", "joe"),
  new NameValuePair("password", "bloggs")
};
post.setRequestBody(data);
// execute method and handle any error responses.
...
InputStream in = post.getResponseBodyAsStream();
// handle response.

Now, I agree with Marijn and Jared, if this is a one shot it’s probably just not worth it, and some creative scripting with eg cURL or Selenium would be a much faster way to solve your problem.