Is it possible?

Steveire

If i had a list of wiki pages and one change i wanted to make to each of them, can i somehow do this automatically.
Specifically, one thing i want do is open user pages and add the code
<USERNAME>
to each page. Getting the list of pages is the easy bit. I already know how i would make a list like the one below.

http://www.boards.ie/wiki/index.php?title=User:Acous&action=edit
http://www.boards.ie/wiki/index.php?title=User:Agent_smith&action=edit
http://www.boards.ie/wiki/index.php?title=User:Airetam_storm&action=edit
http://www.boards.ie/wiki/index.php?title=User:Amp&action=edit

I'd like to give this a shot myself if i can be pointed in the direction of the software i need and stuff like that.

Thanks.

seamus

The theory is easy enough. A script could easily parse the urls, take out the username, open the url, and add the relevant data to the textbox.

There are only two problems/unknowns I can think of:
1. You need to login to edit pages. May not be too difficult if you know a bit about http headers.
2. How to submit the data to the webserver.

I'm thinking in terms of PHP, as it could easily be hacked together quickly to do this. But Perl may do an even better job, and I don't really know Perl.

Syth

There is a very handy Perl module called WWW::Mechanize. It's designed to make it easy to machanicially interact with web forms. It's on CPAN.

Steveire

As an idiot, I have no knowledge of what PHP or PERL are or how to use them. It seems that this Mechanize thing is the right way to go. I did a search. There's some examples here
do i need to download anything to use this stuff? (Read: Anything that doesn't come with XP) Or should i go into college to do it? I can use cygwin in there, although i'd still be a bit lost to actually use this stuff. I reckon i'd be able to do the code though.

WizZard

You'll need ActivePerl for windows to run Perl scripts. It comes with decent docs that should have you up and running in no time.