Newbie: Downloading a pushed file

Josh joshl at commenspace.org
Tue Aug 24 12:31:59 EDT 2004


First, I'm new at this.

Next, my question:  I'm trying to write a script that downloads 
requested files from a website.

The site works, I think, as follows:
  1:  Give the site a URL
  2:  Site comes back with a 'waiting' message, then after some time 
returns a bunch of download URL's
  3:  If you open a window with the new download url _in the same 
browser session_ then you get a new window which says things like 
'processing' for a while, and then pushes you a file, for lack of a 
better word.  It's sort of like when you go to sourceforge and click a 
download mirror, and then after a few seconds you get a window pop up 
asking to save the file.

Now, so far I've managed, in an ugly manner I am sure, to get the 
initial page, parse the download URL's, and I did this having pything 
use an IE browser, as described in:
http://vsbabu.org/mt/archives/2003/06/13/ie_automation.html

My problem is when I get to the download page, how do I tell ie to go 
ahead and save the file it gets pushed?

Another question would be how do I do it without IE .. I assume if I 
keep the socket open and send the site some header, perhaps 
HTTP_REFERER, then it will let me move on to the download pages, but I 
havent even figured out how to re-read the socket after the initial page 
refreshes (every re-read comes up blank, even though I know the page 
should have sent me new data)

Sorry for my probably poorly worded descriptions, and thanks for any help.

   -Josh



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