How to make a bot with PHP to log in and do things on a website

Question

What I'm trying to do is make a bot that will register on the site using my account and do some work automatically (of course, legitimate work).

For example, there might be a forum post with thousands of comments divided into hundreds of pages. Only registered users can view the message. I want to find the comments of a particular user there, and I want the PHP bot to log into my account, read each page of comments one by one and extract the comments of that particular user and display them to me.

This was, of course, an example. I can do the extraction and parsing, but I can not get the bot to go in and move on. I'm just new to PHP, I tried the following:

• Used my own form to transfer data to the login page of the site, but did not work, because he continued to speak the wrong referent.

• I logged in manually and then opened my script in a new tab, but it also did not work, and he asked the bot to log in again.

So please give me an idea on how to do this? Basically, you need to go to the login page, somehow enter your username and password, log in, go to a specific page and do something.

By the way, can this be done with JavaScript?

Thanks.

Answer 1

You need php_curl to authenticate and then, as soon as you get the session, you can do the extraction. Something like that:

$host = curl_init($url); curl_setopt($host, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Content-Type: application/xml', $additionalHeaders)); curl_setopt($host, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1); curl_setopt($host, CURLOPT_USERPWD, $username . ":" . $password); curl_setopt($host, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 30); curl_setopt($host, CURLOPT_POST, 1); curl_setopt($host, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $payloadName); curl_setopt($host, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE); $return = curl_exec($host); curl_close($host);