Re: [Bug-wget] wget post needs better docs

[Fernando Cassia]

Hi Micah,

Thanks for the prompt reply, my comments below...

On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 1:24 PM, Micah Cowan <address@hidden> wrote:

> Note that --post-file is not for "attaching files" to a form post:

Now, that sounds like a good Request for Enhancement, doesn't it? :-))

> it does exactly the same thing as --post-data, and takes exactly the same
> sort of 'foo=bar&baz=quux' values. The _only_ difference between the two
> is that --post-data takes its values from the commandline, while the
> other reads it from a file.

Well this is no big deal, I mean, I could probably stick the username
and password at the beginning of the file.
The crux of the matter here is if it would accept a file full of CR/LF
chars.... or does it also expect the file to have the whole string on
a single line??

> This is mentioned in the docs, but IMO not
> very clearly; I'll file a bug against them.

Thanks!. Appreciate it. It would also really really help if the wget
--help screen showed immediately below these two options:

-------
 ^^ these two options cannot currently be used together.

-------

>
> Currently Wget does not do multipart form posts, which would be
> necessary for posting files properly.

I don't really think what I'm trying to achieve is sending a file or
even a multipart form post.
I have a web form I'm trying to fill automagically fill which has 3
values: username, password, a big text entry field, which goes to a
third var.

Please forgive me if I'm wrong, but I alwats thought that multipart
form posts was needed when you wanted to send Binary files with a
different mime-type along the http-post.

> Currently to post files, you have
> to specify them as a regular name/value pair, and take care to
> percent-encode the file contents (yuck!).

Is there any easy way to achieve this from shell? anything in gnu
shellutils perhaps? bash?

Thanks,
FC