cURL help needed!

[Barrucadu]

I'm working on a new personal website for myself that parses my last.fm profile, facebook profile, and a few other things to generate the content. It will be a sort of portal of personal information with links to the various other profiles to see more detail.

At the moment, it is parsing a cached copy of my facebook profile that I am updating manually to grab the data. I think it should be possible to make it log in to facebook with my username and password, and grab the profile page automatically using cURL so it will always be up to date - but I'm really not sure how to do that.

Can anyone shed some light on how to solve this?

 

[Peter]

Firstly you have to become familiar with how the facebook login system works. To do this log in a few times and track all the header information that is sent and received during the procedure.

Once you are familiar with this you can then go ahead and replicate this using cURL

 

[Barrucadu]

I was hoping for some code, but figuring it out for myself is probabl best :p
I'll finish fixing up the bugs in my profile parser, then head over to facebook armed with a text editor, PHP, and telnet.

 

[anantshri]

do keep in mind if using curl with https you need to add a simple line at start, to let it communicate at https

 

[Daniel]

Personally I love the Live HTTP Headers Firefox extension for this sort of work.

Helped me before!

 

[Peter]

yeah thats the same as I use Daniel however it can be good to do it with telnet sometimes as it helps you understand exactly what is going on