Programmatically query some website

Hi,

First I really am a newb concerning HTML and web programming in general. I would like to know if the following is possible ;

Here is a website for querying data at the ING Astronomical Data Centre ; http://casu.ast.cam.ac.uk/casuadc/archives/ingarch/@@query.html

I'm not even sure this is in the HTML language, but it seems like it. However, what I would like to do is querying their website without having to manually fill up the form each time, but instead building some URL with my code libraries to directly get to the result page.

I'll give you one example of how I would like to fill the form ;

Target Name : [empty]
Coordinates : 04 43 13.8 29 47 21
Search Box : 00 00 30
Telescope : WHT - William Herschel Telescope
Instrument : All
All other fields : what is there by default

You can enter it by hand and see what the result page should be (No results, in fact).

Do anybody know how to directly query such results building an URL ?

Thanks a lot

Contact them and get more information on their "query".
Typically, this is called an API (application programming interface).

See if they offer any examples of how it works ... specifically using PHP.
It would be really good if they offered query results in the form of an XML file.

You didn't post this in the PHP section of this forum, but that's what your solution will be.

Let us know what information they give you on accessing their database.


.

I have contacted them and they said they have no such thing yet, but in the future they should do it.

I'll probably have to wait a decade before querying multiple objects without entering them manually one by one, but anyway ! Thanks for your help !