query.send(handleQueryResponse);
 
function handleQueryResponse(response){
 
     alert('Processing...');
 
}

If you wanted to pass extra variables to the callback function, you can do it like this.

 
var param1 = 'something';
 
var param2 ='something else';
 
query.send(function(response) { handleQueryResponse(response, param1, param2) });
 
function handleQueryResponse(response,param1,param2){
 
     alert('Processing...');
 
     alert(param1);
 
     alert(param2);
 
}

So a url with multiple query parameters, encoded using htmlentities() would look like this:

http://www.bradino.com/?color=white&size=medium&quantity=3

and when that url is accessed the second and third query parameters are not recognized because instead of separating the subsequent variables with an & that character gets converted into &. I could not find a good way to resolve this, so basically I just encoded the query string back to normal using html_entity_decode() and then slammed the parameters back into the $_GET array using parse_str().

$query = html_entity_decode($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']);
 
parse_str($query,$_GET);

There must be a better way! Anyone come across this before?

Download PHP Screen Scraping Class

Updates

20009-07-30 Added setHeader() function

php /path/cake/console/cake.php bake all -app /path/app/

So I manually typed in the model name and I got a missing database table for model error. I checked and double-checked and the database table was named properly. Turns out that some files inside the /app/tmp/cache/ folder were causing Cake not to recognize that I had added new tables to my database. Once I deleted the cache files cake instantly recognized my new database tables and I was baking away!

rm -Rf /path/app/tmp/cache/cake*

Purely hypothetical example:

SELECT `name` FROM `beers` WHERE `favorite` = true

To force the database NOT to give you a cached result simply add SQL_NO_CACHE to the query:

SELECT SQL_NO_CACHE `name` FROM `beers` WHERE `favorite` = true

SELECT COUNT( SUBSTRING_INDEX( `email` , '@', -1 ) ) AS `count` , 
SUBSTRING_INDEX( `email` , '@', -1 ) AS `domain`
FROM `subscribers` WHERE `email` != '' 
GROUP BY `domain`
ORDER BY `count` DESC

This sql statement assumes that the table is called ‘subscribers’ and the column containing the email addresses is ‘email’. Change these two values to match your table name and email address column name.

Again, I am using the cScrape class I wrote, which you can download.

Step 1
First go to twitter.com and look at the source code of the login to get the form field names and the form post location. You will see that the form posts to https://twitter.com/session and the username and password fields are session[username_or_email] and session[password] respectively.

Step 2
Now you are ready to login. So using the fetch function in the Scrape class you create an associative array to contain the form values you want to post. The other thing you will need to do is uncomment the lines for CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE and CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR. Cookies will be required to stay logged in and scrape around. The paths to the cookie files need to be writable by your app. Also you will need to uncomment the line about CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION.

$data = array('session[username_or_email]' => "bradino", 'session[password]' => "secret");
 
$scrape->fetch('https://twitter.com/sessions',$data);

Step 1.5
Oops that didn’t work. All I got back was 403 Forbidden: The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it. Ahhh I see another variable called authenticity_token I bet Twitter was looking for that. So let’s back up and first hit twitter.com to get the authenticity_token variable, and then make the login post request with that variable included in our array of parameters.

$scrape->fetch('https://twitter.com');
 
$data = array('session[username_or_email]' => "bradino", 'session[password]' => "secret");
 
$data['authenticity_token'] = $scrape->fetchBetween('name="authenticity_token" type="hidden" value="','"',$scrape->result);
 
$scrape->fetch('https://twitter.com/sessions',$data);
 
echo $scrape->result;

So that’s basically it. Now you are logged in and can scrape around and request other pages as you normally would. Sorry it wasn’t a longer post. I really do enjoy this kind of stuff so if anyone has a request, hit me up.

Errors?
1) Make sure that you are properly parsing the token variable
2) Make sure that you uncommented the lines about CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE and CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, those options need to be enabled and be sure the path set is writable by your application
3) Make sure that the path to the cookie file is writable and that it is getting data written to it
4) If you get a message about being redirected you need to uncomment the line about CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, that option needs to be enabled true

A quick and dirty trick to force Excel (hopefully you are using OpenOffice) to display the full zipcode, we wrap it in double quotes and put an equal sign in front of it, to force it to be a string like this:

$zipcode = 00123;
 
$data = '="' . $zipcode . '"' ;

So if you are doing the straight query to CSV export, using the fputcsv function it would look something like this. Basically just overwrite the value in the row and then continue along.

while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($query)){
 
	$row['zipcode'] = '="'.$row['zipcode'].'"';
 
	fputcsv($output, $row);
}

Find people who are 30 years old

SELECT DATE_FORMAT( FROM_DAYS( TO_DAYS( now( ) ) - TO_DAYS( `dob` ) ) , '%Y' ) +0 AS `age`
FROM `people` HAVING `age` = 30

Find people who are 31-42 years old

SELECT DATE_FORMAT( FROM_DAYS( TO_DAYS( now( ) ) - TO_DAYS( `dob` ) ) , '%Y' ) +0 AS `age`
FROM `people` HAVING `age` >= 31 AND `age` <= 42

Find oldest person

SELECT MAX(DATE_FORMAT( FROM_DAYS( TO_DAYS( now( ) ) - TO_DAYS( `dob` ) ) , '%Y' ) +0) AS `age`
FROM `people`

Find youngest person

SELECT MIN(DATE_FORMAT( FROM_DAYS( TO_DAYS( now( ) ) - TO_DAYS( `dob` ) ) , '%Y' ) +0) AS `age`
FROM `people`

Here is a working example:

How did you hear about BRADINO?

function overrideListmenu(field){
 
	if ($F(field) == 'Other'){
 
		Element.replace($(field), '<input name="'+field+'" id="'+field+'" type="text" value="">');
 
		$(field).focus();
 
	}
 
}

function overrideListmenu(field){
 
	if ($('#'+field).val() == 'Other'){
 
		$('#'+field).after('<input name="'+field+'" id="'+field+'" type="text" value="">').remove(); 
 
		$('#'+field).focus();
 
	}
 
}