试图从大学目录中提取课程列表

Question

I am writing a program that will allow people to make their class schedule for the following quarter. In order to do this, I need to extract all the classes available for next quarter. The way my school has their course catalog set up makes it a little hard to extract the info, but if you are able to help me automate a few commands, I think it will be easy.

Here is the university catalog: http://my.sa.ucsb.edu/public/curriculum/coursesearch.aspx You will see that you need to: - Load the page - Choose subject area from pull down - Choose quarter from pull down - Choose class level from pull down - Trigger the search button - Repeat for all subject areas From there, I have written my code so that I just save the page as $SUBJECTAREA.aspx And I have a few scripts to extract the data from it. I want to be able to trigger this script on my server, so that I can update my course list at anytime directly to the server.

My real question is how should I approach this problem? I have looked at SimpleTest, which is a php testing solution that has a browser function. Although, with the limited time I have been playing with it, I'm not sure this is the solution I want.

I think that jQuery was another choice I found online to possible do this, but I do not know enough to know for sure.

Basically I just want to know how I should go about doing this task, and maybe a resource online to get me started in that direction. I am more than capable of figuring it out once I am pointed in a certain direction.

Thanks all!

Answer 1

You will see that you need to: - Load the page - Choose subject area from pull down - Choose quarter from pull down - Choose class level from pull down - Trigger the search button

ie. a POST request

And I have a few scripts to extract the data from it.

Then all you need is the list of topics, quarters and levels, which you can get similarly from the same page.

you need an http library - curl, http components, whatever - and a loop.