Question

Thanks to a well made personal php project, I got an offer to do a paid php project on a freelancer site. Trouble is I am lost on how to proceed 🙁 .
Could someone guide one what is to be done here? would really really appreciate it.

My understanding of the project :

Step1 . It involves making a tool that ‘goes’ to a webpage(with a userid of a browser) > sets a a cookie(plaintext) > sends the cookie to the server > goes to a final page(this page requires that plaintext cookie) .

step2: The final page has a search form . The use of my tool would be to enter search terms in this form and extract and parse the resultant html data into a mysql database .

Questions:

1. can this be done using php ? if so what am I looking at here. I know how to do php programming from the point of view of the server , (setcookie,getcookie , send html pages) , but here I would be the client.

2. any other suggestions please

Thanks

Answer 1

Since step 2 involves having a search page on a web server, I’m guessing the client would also like step 1 to be able to run without use of the command line. However, you should really just ask and find out for sure!

I suggest you look at the cURL library. You will be able to set cookies and have the script navigate to the webpage, along with that data. You might want to have a look at this page if you’re doing searching in a MySQL database.