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I've been struggling with this for a few days now, I was hoping I could find some help here!

I have a simple html page which has two frames. The frameset looks like :

<frameset rows=15%,*>
<frame src="frTop.html" name="frTop">
<frame src="frBot.html" name="frBot">
</frameset>

The frame "frTop" has a textbox and a button. When you input a value in that box and hit the button, it loads a URL into the frame "frBot".

The page that loads has some values in it, and one of them is a dynamic value (It doesn't change unless you manually change it in the page).

What I want to do is to load the URL, and pull that dynamic value into a variable/textbox/something that I can manipulate.

The idea being, I want to specify 100-200 values, visit each of those URLs, grab the value, and store it into a spreadsheet.

My biggest problem is that the URL being loaded is an external link, ie : I am not able to access the elements of that page using the getElementById("") command. (My knowledge of HTML is limited, so I am not sure if this approach would work or not).

Additional Info : The dynamic element I want has the following segment of code in the HTML of the external page.

<span class="status"></span>

Thanks in Advance, Sai

Nom
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1 Answers1

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I almost never use iframes, so I may be wrong here, but I believe you cannot manipulate the DOM of the document in an iframe if the source is from an external site due to some security reasons.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe you are referring to html sniffing in that you perform a deep dive on an externally fetched site to search through their html for some specific piece of information.

This would require a language that allows you to make an http request, read in the file, and parse through it for what you want. This can be a standalone application written in C#, Java, etc. or even a server-side script such as PHP, ASP, etc.

Setting up such an application is beyond the scope of this answer, though.

user17753
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  • Thanks for the quick and helpful reply! And yeah, that is what I expected. Is there any other way to achieve the same effect? I am currently trying to work with AutoIt to simulate some onscreen effects, not sure how effective they would be, though. – Nom Mar 09 '12 at 14:40