[Gambas-user] Web application - CURL and Cookies?

[Benoit Minisini]

On mardi 11 novembre 2008, birchy wrote:
> I have a need to develop a web app that can do the following:
> 1) interact with a web server via http
> 2) login to the site and maintain a session via cookies
> 3) parse the html
>
> There is a large selection of libraries that can do this in Java, but i'm
> much more familiar with VB6/Gambas. As far as i understand, the solutions
> are:
> 1) gb.net.curl
> 2) gb.net.curl
> 3) gb.xml
>
> I have read that curl can handle cookies, but have no idea how to do it in
> Gambas - are there any code samples? 

No, but by reading the source code, I can say that:

HttpClient.CookieFile allows you to define a file where cookies will be read.

And HttpClient.UpdateCookies should tell if the previous file will be updated 
during the HTTP request.

> gb.xml is based on libxml2 and i have 
> read that libxml2 can also handle html...but again, i cannot find any
> information on how to do this in Gambas via gb.xml as the documentation is
> very incomplete. 

Some variant of HTML can be parsed with an XML parser. But most the time it 
does not work, as HTML is not strict enough.

But I just read on the libxml2 website that this library knows how to parse 
HTML too. So if you find a volunteer to implement it in the gb.xml component?

> Can anyone confirm that Gambas is capable of producing my 
> web app, or would i be better off using Java?

No idea. It depends on what you need exactly.

Regards,

-- 
Benoit Minisini