using php curl to extract data from a website with multiple submits

Question

I have to extract data from a website via multiple submits and this has to be done automatically... the flow is as follows...

1. Go to this page...http://www.licindia.in/premium_calculator.htm.
2. Select something and then submit it. This will take me to a form
3. Fill up the form there and submit it...
4. get the html that is produced. and extract data.

I have used curl earlier to log into websites remotely but I cant seem to get this working anyway.

$url="http://www.licindia.in/premium_calculator.htm";
$postdata = "thepostdata"
$cookie = "cookie.txt" ;
$ch = curl_init(); 
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url); 
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, true);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:13.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/13.0");
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_COOKIESESSION,false); 
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 60); 
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1); 
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);  
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, $referer);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $cookie);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postdata); 
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1); 
$result = curl_exec ($ch);
curl_close($ch);

Something like this i have tried...this is not the actual thing..but this is similar

Answer 1

I think your first issue is that the form on the page you linked is actually loaded from an iframe .

You will want to use that iframe 's url instead since cURL will not load the iframe srouce from the parent page.