Using cURL with a username/password site?

[ironskirt]

I writing a applescript studio app that is bringing together data and charts from several websites and displaying it all in one window. The data is easy enough because I am getting it from Yahoo using URL Access Scripting. The problem is I am downloading the charts from a website that has a username/password front page (I do pay a subscription). When I using URL Access to download the charts ( a .png file, if that matters), the file is simply a graphic telling me to log on to the site to view the chart.

Basically, the question is… Can URL Access scripting handle this and how? Or does cURL (with which I have little experience) have the ability?

thanks,

ironskirt

[John_M]

Hi ironskirt,

The cURL manual explains how to do this.

@cURL Manual

HTTP

The HTTP URL doesn’t support user and password in the URL string. Curl
does support that anyway to provide a ftp-style interface and thus you can
pick a file like:

    curl http://name:passwd@machine.domain/full/path/to/file

or specify user and password separately like in

    curl -u name:passwd http://machine.domain/full/path/to/file

HTTP offers many different methods of authentication and curl supports
several: Basic, Digest, NTLM and Negotiate. Without telling which method to
use, curl defaults to Basic. You can also ask curl to pick the most secure
ones out of the ones that the server accepts for the given URL, by using
–anyauth.

NOTE! Since HTTP URLs don’t support user and password, you can’t use that
style when using Curl via a proxy. You must use the -u style fetch
during such circumstances.

You would access cURL from a do shell script command in Applescript.

set myVar to do shell script "curl http://www.apple.com"

I have no experience in dealing with images with cURL and Applescript.

HTH

John M

[ironskirt]

thanks john for your reply,

I tried cURL with its various parameters for username:password to no avail. URL Access Scripting at least downloaded a graphics file telling to log on the the website, cURL downloaded a null file.

I did use cURL with the -i parameter to find out the site is using formsLogin.asp. So back to the web to find out what I need to do to accomplish this task.

thanks again

ironskirt