Thank you Felix and also to the individual who replied off-list. re: html code -- you are both indeed correct that the form elements are named within the html code for a simple form, and i thank you both for letting me know about this. For simple forms i think i will try and write myself a function which can automatically identify these elements, probably using the XML package. It looks to me like R only has to inspect the contents of the <form></form> tag to determine these names.
re: javascript and Ajax -- I think these are beyond my current skill and was not able to investigate, but thank you for the suggestion in this direction, it may be that i can learn about this in the future. for anyone who does a search on this topic, the html form elements in the html code below are called: "licenseID", "content" and "paramsXML". ### html code example start ### <html> <head> <title>Calais test page</title> </head> <body> <form action="http://api.opencalais.com/enlighten/rest/"; method="post" accept-charset="utf-8"> licenseID: <input type="text" name="licenseID" /> <input type="submit" /><br /> content: <br /> <textarea rows="15" cols="80" name="content" ></textarea><br /> paramsXML: <br /> <textarea rows="15" cols="80" name="paramsXML" /></ textarea><br /> </form> </body> </html> ### html code example end ### ### something like the following would help identify the form element names i think library(XML) #src.file <- [location of the html code above] html <- htmlTreeParse(src.file, useInternal=TRUE, error=function(...) {}) xpathApply(html, "//body//form//text()", xmlValue) [[1]] [1] "\r\n\tlicenseID: " [[2]] [1] "\r\n\tcontent: " [[3]] [1] "\r\n\tparamsXML: " Cheers, Tony Breyal On 10 Dec, 03:06, "Felix Andrews" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 2008/12/10 Tony Breyal <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > > > > Dear R-Help, > > > I am looking into using the Open Calais web service (http:// > > sws.clearforest.com/calaisViewer/) for text mining purposes. I would > > like to use R to post text into one of the forms on their website. > > > In package RCurl, there is a function called postForm(). This sounds > > like it would do the job. Unfortunately the URL used in the example is > > no longer valid (i have emailed the maintainer about this). > > > Question: How does one determine the name of the form elements to use? > > is there an R function which will print out the names of these > > elements perhaps? > > > [i am still learning, so please forgive me if i used the wrong > > terminology.] > > > ### Example from ?postForm ### > > library(RCurl) > > # Now looking at POST method for forms. > > postForm("http://www.speakeasy.org/~cgires/perl_form.cgi";, > > "some_text" = "Duncan", > > "choice" = "Ho", > > "radbut" = "eep", > > "box" = "box1, box2" > > ) > > ### Example ends ### > > > So in the above code, i believe the form elements are: "some_text", > > "choice", "redbut" and "box". But how does one find out the names of > > these form elements if one is not given them previously? > > You need to look at the HTML source of the web page to work out what > the form elements are called. However, in your case, it is not a > simple form; rather the form is handled by a javascript function which > uses Ajax to handle the request. Imitating the javascript, you may be > able to post the data > tohttp://sws.clearforest.com/calaisViewer//Bridge.asmx/BridgeMe > with an element 'content' containing the (url-encoded) text, and an > element 'type' = 'text/txt'. > > If that works it would return the result in an XML block. > > > > > I hope that the above made sense, and thank you kindly in advance for > > any help. > > Tony Breyal. > > > ______________________________________________ > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list > >https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > > PLEASE do read the posting guidehttp://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. > > -- > Felix Andrews / 安福立http://www.neurofractal.org/felix/ > 3358 543D AAC6 22C2 D336 80D9 360B 72DD 3E4C F5D8 > > ______________________________________________ > [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing listhttps://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guidehttp://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
