Posting to a web page and reading the response

POST and GET are two types of request in HTTP to send information to or retrieve information from a website. In a GET request, we send parameters (name-value pairs) through the web page URL itself. The POST command places the key/value pairs in the message body instead of the URL. POST is commonly used when submitting long forms or to conceal information submitted from a casual glance.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we will use the sample guestbook website included in the tclhttpd package. You can download tclhttpd from http://sourceforge.net/projects/tclhttpd and then run it on your local system to create a local web server. The guestbook page requests a name and URL which it adds to a guestbook to show who has visited a site when the user clicks on the Add me to your guestbook button.

This process can be automated with a single curl (or wget) command.

How to do it...

Download the tclhttpd package and cd to the bin folder. Start the tclhttpd daemon...