Web stress tester

[Cameron Laird]

In article <omt45v48ee3b9j2d2orpapcq7b39d2t89c at 4ax.com>,
Dale Strickland-Clark  <dale at riverhall.NOTHANKS.co.uk> wrote:
>I need to write a little web stress tester.
>
>What's the best way of pulling out values from forms and submitting
>new ones?
>
>I don't need the flexibility of HTMLParser. I just need the form field
>names and values.
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			.
			.
We're probably going to demand more details.

Commercial Web stress testers typically cost $100,000
and more.  While I'm with you in my optimism about the
good that can come with a little bit of scripting,
industry consensus is that this is a *big* job.

I have an article coming out in a few days on the topic
of Web scraping.  I suspect that's what you're after 
when you ask for "the best way of pulling out values
from forms".  Can you give a concrete illustration of
one example of what it means to you to "pull out values
from forms"?

If you need form field names and values from an other-
wise unconstrained HTML page, than you need HTMLParser
or equivalent, as <URL: http://
www.unixreview.com/documents/s=2472/uni1037388368795/ >
hints.  Only if you happen to know that the page follows
a particular format, more specific than HTML, can you
reliably depend on regular expressions or simpler parsing
means.

-- 

Cameron Laird <Cameron at Lairds.com>
Business:  http://www.Phaseit.net
Personal:  http://phaseit.net/claird/home.html