How to submit text via forms using JSoup

Question

I'd like to submit some text into this form using JSoup. How would I go about doing this?

<form id="quickpostform" action="" method="post" style="display: block; text-align: center; ">
<input type="hidden" name="action" value="reply"/>
<input type="hidden" name="auth" value="54a9871a63a1c285879a5327faf3d8d2"/>
<input type="hidden" name="thread" value="135454"/>
<div id="quickreplytext">
<textarea id="quickpost" style="width: 95%; " tabindex="1" onkeyup="resize('quickpost');" name="body" cols="90" rows="8"/>
<br/>
</div>

Solution 1

Take a look at the jsoup.connect method and the Connection interface.

Once you have the text you want to submit ready to go, you can post it to a URL as a form submission.

E.g.:

Document doc = Jsoup.connect(url)
    .data("action", "reply")
    .data("auth", "54a9871a63a1c285879a5327faf3d8d2")
    .data("thread", "135454")
    .data("quickreplytext", replyText)
    .post();

The returned doc object will be the result page of the post.

Solution 2

jSoup

Elements txtArea = doc.select("#quickpost");
txtArea.text(yourText);

JSoup Documentation

jQuery

$('#quickpost').val(yourText);

Comments

[Gwindow]

How would I go about posting it back to the site?

[citizen conn]

jSoup is for scraping and parsing HTML, not really for modifying display. For that you would use jQuery on the client side. See my edited answer.

[Gwindow]

anyway to do it with jSoup rather than jQuery?

[Gwindow]

I'm not sure how to answer that question.

[citizen conn]

What are you using to show web pages to the user? Java is a server-side technology.

[Gwindow]

I'm writing an android app, I'm parsing page sources from a site using JSoup, and displaying certain parts.