APPLESCRIPT AND HTML PARSING.

Question

hi,
im new to applescript so im not quite sure if what i want to do is actually called html parsing.. but basically i want to put a variable in applescript that is linked to the actual html but i dont know how to make applescript access data inside a html code... to give u a better idea, inside the html is something like this:
100
now that value "100" changes but its maximum amount is 100. i want to create a script which responds to change when that value starts to drop by loading another link.
am i making sense? again the thing id like to achieve is make applescript use that value INSIDE the HTML as its own variable (and perform the right actions as that value changes)
any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

In first place you could open the site you talked about in safari and run a little javascript via applescript to get that value.
Javascript is the "best" way to get a special value out of an HTML-Element, but only works in browsers.
e.g.
tell application "Safari"
open location "http://apple.com"
delay 6
set mypromo to do JavaScript "document.getElementById('promos').getElementsByTagName('a')[0].title" in document 1
display dialog "Title of first Promo is:" & return & mypromo
end tell
Or you could just d/l the pure source convert it to text and search for the phrase you are looking for
e.g.
set mysource_html to do shell script "curl http://mysite.org/bla.html"
set mysource_txt to do shell script "curl http://mysite.org/bla.html | textutil -stdin -convert txt -format html -stdout"
if mysource_html contains "<a>100</a>" then
display dialog "Hey, value of 100 is reached"
end if
--or something like
if mysource_txt contains "100" then
display dialog "Hey, value of 100 is reached"
end if