Ruby is blowing up on me when I use fieldnames with colons such as "_ctl0:ContentPlaceHolder1:tbLastName"
you can irb session looks like: this which you can copy and paste to try it as the site is on the web. http://pastie.caboo.se/159184
require 'rubygems' require 'mechanize' agent = WWW::Mechanize.new page = agent.get('https://www.sss.gov/RegVer/wfVerification.aspx’) pp page
# from the output I see that the form name is {name "aspnetForm"} sss_form = page.form('aspnetForm')
pp sss_form # I prints the form which I can see a few filed names including # #<WWW::Mechanize::Form::Field:0x110f224 @name="InitialDay", @value="29"> # and another one for this sample # #<WWW::Mechanize::Form::Field:0x110d348 @name="_ctl0:ContentPlaceHolder1:tbLastName", value="">
sss_form.InitialDay = "1" # => "1" sss_form._ctl0:ContentPlaceHolder1:tbLastName = 'Smith' #SyntaxError: compile error #(irb):14: syntax error, unexpected ':', expecting $end #sss_form._ctl0:ContentPlaceHolder1:tbLastName = 'Smith' # ^ # from (irb):14 # from :