Automatically search website field and get resulting URL - url

Question

I want to automatically search a string at http://www.drugbank.ca/ and get the resulting URL (the search field is at the top of the page). The website can't be searched just by manipulating the URL. Is there a server-based way to do this? I want to create my own webpage with an input field and button to "Search DrugBank for X and get the URL".
Thanks.

Answer 1

You need to get the contents of:
http://www.drugbank.ca/search?query=searchstring
You can't do this with javascript it's not allowed by the browser to query sites of different domains (due to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same_origin_policy).
I would do it with php and create a file like searchDrugBank.php:
<?php
$urlContent = file_get_contents('http://www.drugbank.ca/search?query=' . $_GET['q']);
// process $urlContent however you want
?>
And then you put on your site:
<form method="get" action="searchDrugBank.php">
<input type="text" name="q" />
<input type="submit" value="Search drugbank"/>
</form>
(Since you asked)
To find what URL I was gonna query I went to the site, and looked at the form that was submitted when I pressed search (look at the source, or in it's easy to do "inspect element" on for example the searchbox or searchbutton).
I find that the form is:
<form accept-charset="UTF-8" action="/search" method="get"><div style="margin:0;padding:0;display:inline"><input name="utf8" type="hidden" value="✓"></div>
<strong>Search:</strong>
<input id="query" name="query" placeholder="Search DrugBank" size="30" type="search">
<input name="commit" type="submit" value="Search">
Help / Advanced
</form>
Which means that when you press search, exactly what happends is that you will do a GET request, since method="get" and get request means to ask for an url, and if parameters is required, they should be in the URL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Query_string#Web_forms).
The URL that will be queried is /search since action is action="/search" the rest of the url will then be built using provided parameters here it's just:
<input id="query" name="query" placeholder="Search DrugBank" size="30" type="search">
And there you can see that name of the parameter that should be provided to do a search, namely "query"!