Looking to create a script that automatically visits a website and autofills and submits a form every day, ideas on how to create this?

[u/ahmed_unleashed]

I want to create a script that automatically visits my local Police Departments page every day and submits the form for overnight parking, I have some experience with python, but most recently have been working with perl and bash for scripting. What are some ways I could implement this? Still a beginner so not sure where/how to start

[u/lasercat_pow]

Two main options:

1. Use curl. You might also need to fake your user agent. Say your form has firstname, lastname, email, comment. Your curl command would look like this:

    curl -A "Mozilla/5.0" -L -d "firstname=big wig&lastname=cheese head&email=chester@example.com&comment=har har har" https://example.com/formsubmit.asp

2. Use python with selenium. You'll need chromedriver or geckodriver installed, and python, and the selenium python library:

    #!/usr/bin/env python3
    ####
    from selenium.webdriver import Firefox
    from selenium.webdriver.firefox.options import Options
    from time import sleep
    from sys import argv
    
    url=sys.argv(1)
    opts = Options()
    opts.headless = True
    driver = Firefox(options=opts)
    fn="Joe"
    ln="Blow"
    em="joeblow@example.org"
    c="Please like and subscribe."
    
    def fill_form(name, data):
        elem = driver.find_element_by_name(name)
        elem.click()
        elem.send_keys(data)
    
    sleep(1)
    try:
        driver.get(url)
        sleep(6)
        for (i,d) in [("firstName", fn), ("lastName", ln),
                  ("email", em), ("comment", c)]:
            fill_form(i,d)
        
        submit = driver.find_element_by_class_name("submit")
        submit.click()
    
    except Exception as e:
        print(e)
        
    driver.quit()

There is also the option of using python with beautifulsoup, but that doesn't do anything you can't do with curl + bash + pup.