interacting with a website through request

[real_in]

i was wondering about certain stuff. Like how to people make certain addons, which talk to a website(send request) and get a reply from them and display.

let me make it more clearer. There is an addon available to which if i provide username and password, fetches details from ISP's server about my account usage. how is this possible ?

some addons just checks the ISP name if we give them a IP address.. how do they interact with a website ? i mean we can read the information but how do our programs do that ???

can anyone explain me ? is it CGI or what ??

thanks ..

 

[Vormund]

Well, your ISP would be the one logging the information. Your name/password just allows the "addon" to authenticate and pull that info from the website. The only other feasible way would be your router, since many of them track such information.

Then if you're sneaky, you can write scripts to "pretend" to be a browser, and open various web pages as you would on your own - thereby allowing you to strip any information you want...

 

[real_in]

i guess that is not the way you talking mate, i mean how is this possible ?? and that router thing is valid but not for all.. so i need something which is universal, second option looks quiet good but looks to be an non professional approach, i mean there should be another way out ??

thanks for your concern,btw

 

[Vormund]

Well if someone is providing a nice XML file to you, it's easy to get the information. Like, for example, one of CNN's RSS feeds. That's meant for the public to use for their own purposes and is easily done being XML.

Now that addon, if you watched the outbound http requests, you may see something like "http://usernameassword@yourisp.com/accounts/data.xml", or it may open the HTML page directly and strip the contents. There's a million and one ways.

As far as a professional approach, well, there's no universal way to parse data from any given source...in a usable fashion. I have no idea how your data is formatted to start with, but it boils down to what the content-provider (your ISP in this case) provides...if that makes any sense. :freak:

 

[real_in]

really thanks a lot mate !! will follow that for sure