PROBLEM: My customer support role frequently has me searching through huge, electronic, web-based file listings. Opening a file, using Cntrl-F to search for a string, then using the back button to open another ends up being terribly tedious process.
[To find out what I'm getting at read MILLION DOLLAR QUESTION at the bottom] SOLUTION BACKGROUND: Recently I came across an neat idea called 'screen scraping'. Maybe you are familiar with it: for instance, if I wanted today's temperature on my webpage, I could create regular PHP expressions that make a call to weather.com, return the HTML in a string, search for the temperature information, and then return that to my website - all in a flash: seamless to the user of my website although, of course, morally deficient in terms of royalties for weather.com - but that is a discussion for another day. SOLUTION IMPLEMENTATION: Back to my current delima of the needle-in-a-haystack searches I'm doing, I decided to create a program that would screen scrape for the string in the web-based file directories. First, however, I had to beat the password scheme for the SSL, since the web-based directories are only available on port 443. This was simple enough, I just added the u/p to the url (https://user:[EMAIL PROTECTED]) and logged in using my browser with no trouble! IMPLEMENTATION PROBLEM: The browser was able to return the HTML using 'https://user:[EMAIL PROTECTED]' because it has built-in 128 bit encryption. The problem is that my PHP script can't negotiate the key exchange for the SSL! MILLION DOLLAR QUESTION: Will OPEN SSL allow my PHP script to authenticate an SSL connection to a secure server that is hosting the web-based directories and thusly return the HTML so I can query it for a string I am looking for? Jay Johnston ______________________________________________________________________ OpenSSL Project http://www.openssl.org User Support Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Automated List Manager [EMAIL PROTECTED]
