Hi - I'm hoping that someone might have wrestled with this issue before. Thanks in advance for any insight.

I'm trying to use Curl to post data from a form that searches a news database. The actual search string is quite long, so I've tested my approach on the dictionary search at www.yourdictionary.com - everything worked great there. But, when I try the more complicated query on the actual site I want to access, I get nothing at all returned: no error page - the connection just seems to terminate.

Because the actual url-encoded query text is soooooo long (1027 bytes if I recall), I'm testing this by downloading their HTML form (it has session id stuff and other dynamic fields), changing the action tag to a mailto addressed to me; that gets me an email attachment with all my variables url-encoded. When I use curl with the -d switch and the file name reference, I see the query get entered correctly, then I'm back at the DOS prompt. The status bar shows 0 bytes saved in my output file.

Switching the form action to mailto to generate a test query worked fine on other sites... just not the one I need; maybe there's something else about trying this that's causing the problem. But any other approach gets me a "we cannot process your request" response. Is it possible that their server is booting me because it knows it isn't be accessed by a browser? This is a subscription site, so I wouldn't be surprised if they do more checking than most sites (I think access to the search pages is blocked to non-subscribing IP addresses - there isn't a username/password to enter.) I've tried experimenting with the -A and -e options; they don't seem to help. Are there other things I can try to make my script look and act more like a browser? Are there ways to set environmental variables that might be checked by the server-side script?

Any insight on what's happening in the black-box would be appreciated - it's hard to know what to try next when there's no response from the remote server at all. Thanks for your time.

Laura
Received on 2001-07-15