Posting to a web page and reading the response

POST and GET are two types of requests in HTTP to send information to, or retrieve information from a website. In a GET request, we send parameters (name-value pairs) through the webpage URL itself. In the case of POST , it won't be attached with the URL. POST is used when a form needs to be submitted. For example, a username, the password to be submitted, and the login page to be retrieved.

Posting to pages is used frequently while writing scripts based on webpage retrievals. Let us see how to work with POST. Automating the HTTP GET and POST request by sending the POST data and retrieving the output is a very important task that we practice while writing shell scripts that parse data from websites.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we will use a test website (http://book.sarathlakshman.com/lsc/mlogs/), which is used to submit the current user information, such as the hostname and username. In the home page of the website, there are two fields HOSTNAME...