Bioinformatics For Dummies

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Automate webform submission?

I need to access a mirror of a bioinformatics database hosted on my school which uses a simple web-based form. But I have to do this 3000 times unless I can automate the whole process. Can someone provide pointers to an easy way to automate this.
I think I will have an input.txt containing 3000 lines with the line j containing the values var[j][1], var[j][2], .., var[j][n] (I don't know what n is yet, but may just be 1) where these are the n variables that the web-query would need.

I know some C and some shell scripting, but I would like the easiest and "for-dummies" suggestion.

What playform do you have available? On a Unix box, you could create a simple script that builds the input form and then submits it to the web server using telnet on port 80 (or whatever the port is). You could also write a C program to do it.

Basically, each time through the loop, build the file containing the form data, submit it to the server, then keep going until all of your input records have been read.

An example o fusing the telnet... (assuming at the unix shell)...

$ telnet some.host.name.com 80 <<==eof==
get /oradoc/plsql.pdf
==eof==

The above example will fetch the plsql.pdf document from the web server's document root. Now you can reverse this by building a form and redirecting the get above with the form.

Shotgun sequencing


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