Hi Mike, thank you very much for your reply. I know that mine could be considered > a "very" silly way to define automation. but I'm not a purist nor a professional programmer. Besides that, I know that case by case every problem can be solved and in more "right" way, also in very difficult environments (framed, Javascript heavy pages) ... but not by me!
I must confess: before pressing manually 220 times a "Next" button and save the data sent by the html server (using simply cut/paste), I tried to use shell programming, DCOP etc., but in the end I reverted to the "by hand" method... Perhaps if I were an expert like you, I could have programmed a small script in a matter of minutes. Only after a week I found the solution (twill) but I have discovered that also this solution obliges to consider every case and program the script accordingly (to not mentioning the need of disguising it as a browser). On the other end, the "cheating" method doesn't assure a 100% success, because the html servers can have a high degree of "cleverness". If I would cut out all automatic queries from my server, I would also time between them to see if the stream of queries ("apparently" coming from a browser) are indeed compatible with a browser operated by a human being... For all this reasons, reluctantly, I am going back to Windows and its macro languages. Unfortunately in Windows there are many more security problems... If you have a "general" solution for the X world... While I was posting the reply to Mike I saw the last contribution of Paul Boddie. >From what he says I infer that he is a Windows programmer (OutlookExplorer). In Windows I have no problems (a part security) to program "dirty" automation scripts! But I have a doubt... how my Windows theory accords with DCOP and KDE? Bye. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list