html navigation and getting file from website.

2 related questions:

1. Is there a way/process to write code to navigate through html. I am wanting to go to a specific website, enter information into specific fields, click the search button, which will pull up a results query.

2. Is it possible to grab a specific file (e.g. excel file) from a non-ftp url? I couldn't find that it was possible using the urlwrite function.

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

If urlwrite() is not sufficient for your navigation, then you may wish to use the Java Robot class.

[Ryan]

Do you have any suggestions using the urlwrite function? I'd like to stay in MatLab, as I don't have much experience in Java.

[Walter Roberson]

Could be pretty tricky, as the fields might have been dynamically created by Javascript.

[Ryan]

I'd like to be able to do something similar to the mget function...

mw = ftp('ftp.mathworks.com');

mget(mw, 'README');

close(mw);

This only works for FTP servers I believe though. Is there anyway to accomplish the same thing on an http: url?

[Walter Roberson]

No, http is defined to work with one URL at a time.

If you were to use a package such as cURL to fetch the pages of interest then you might be able to program multiple URLs in to one call to cURL (which would still have to fetch the files one at a time.)