# Help with web forms
**URL:** https://discourse.julialang.org/t/help-with-web-forms/56027
**Category:** New to Julia
**Created:** [February 25, 2021, 4:20pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/help-with-web-forms/56027 "2021-02-25T16:20:37Z")
**Posts on this page:** 5
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@mihalybaci](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/mihalybaci)
#### Post date: [February 25, 2021, 4:20pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/help-with-web-forms/56027/1 "2021-02-25T16:20:37Z")
I’m trying to learn how to do some really simple web stuff, like automatically filling out forms, with Julia and am kind of at loss. I found [this python article](https://dzone.com/articles/how-submit-web-form-python), which has a simple example using DuckDuckGo that I am trying to replicate. The `HTTP.jl` examples mostly cover servers and the POST example is for a REST API, so I’ve only gotten as far as
```julia
using HTTP
url = "https://html.duckduckgo.com/html" # URL for submitting the POST
payload = Dict("q" => "julialang") # name of the search field => the search term
req = HTTP.request("POST", url,... ????) # Proper format here?
results = String(req.body) # Figure out way to extract results
```
As another example, the forms I would like to access are more in the form of web calculators, like [this one](https://www.brewingcalculators.com/celsius-c-to-fahrenheit-f/) for example, where the inputs/outputs are more well-defined. For that calculator (based on the DuckDuckGo one), the parameters would be
```julia
url = "https://www.brewingcalculators.com/celsius-c-to-fahrenheit-f/?" # URL for submitting the POST
payload = Dict("?" => 34) # name of the field => a number
```
So, my first question is, what would be the proper format for the `POST` in these cases? And then, is there a well-defined way to get the results out of the response?
Thanks for any help!
---
### Author:  [@chris-b1](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/chris-b1)
#### Post date: [February 25, 2021, 6:06pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/help-with-web-forms/56027/2 "2021-02-25T18:06:12Z")
HTTP.jl could use more docs/examples - but this should work, wrapping your payload in a `HTTP.Form` - from api docs [here](https://juliaweb.github.io/HTTP.jl/dev/public_interface/#Request-body-types)
```julia
using HTTP
payload = Dict("q" => "julialang")
form = HTTP.Form(payload)
resp = HTTP.post("https://html.duckduckgo.com/html", [], form)
html = String(resp.body)
```
In terms of doing something with the results - that’s a project of its own - but could use something like [EzXML.jl](https://github.com/JuliaIO/EzXML.jl) to parse the html and pull out data. Python has some more mature html/xml scraping libraries so could also call out to them with `PyCall.jl`
But here’s a simple example with EzXML, pulling the text out all the h2 tags in the html
```julia
using EzXML
tree = parsehtml(html)
titles = strip.(nodecontent.(findall("//h2", tree)))
25-element Array{SubString{String},1}:
"The Julia Programming Language"
"Download Julia"
"GitHub - JuliaLang/julia: The Julia Programming Language"
"The Julia Language - Posts | Facebook"
"The Julia Language (@JuliaLanguage) | Твиттер"
```
---
### Author:  [@mihalybaci](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/mihalybaci)
#### Post date: [February 25, 2021, 7:23pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/help-with-web-forms/56027/3 "2021-02-25T19:23:39Z")
Great thanks! I’ll play around with EzXML.
---
### Author:  [@fyzycyst](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/fyzycyst)
#### Post date: [May 14, 2021, 8:41pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/help-with-web-forms/56027/4 "2021-05-14T20:41:43Z")
Look to Chrome’s developer tools… you can actually record the outgoing POST with your form submission and see the exact format of what is sent (along with the headers). It’s a bit brute force, but you can then lovingly handcraft the header and data portions of the POST request.
That at least gets you a minimum working example to expand from.
---
### Author:  [@sampope](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/sampope)
#### Post date: [May 18, 2021, 11:11pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/help-with-web-forms/56027/5 "2021-05-18T23:11:42Z")
thanks for this example. I understand XPath far better than anything else, and it helped me pull out the href’s from a huge html table:
```julia
for n in findall("//tr/td/a/@href", doc)
println(nodecontent(n))
end
```