Extract value via OSX Terminal from .html for "curl" submission within a single script - macos

Question

How do I extract the variable value of the following line of an html page via Terminal to submit it afterwards via "curl -d" in the same script?
<input type="hidden" name="au_pxytimetag" value="1234567890">
Edit: how do I transfer the extracted value to the "curl -d" command within a single script? might be a silly question, but I'm total noob. =0)

Answer 1

EDITED:
I cannot tell from your question what you are actually trying to do. I originally thought you were trying to extract a variable from a file, but it seems you actually want to firstly, get that file, secondly extract a variable, and thirdly, use variable for something else... so let's address each of those steps:
Firstly you want to grab a page using curl, so you will do
curl www.some.where.com
and the page will be output on your terminal. But actually you want to search for something on that page, so you need to do
curl www.some.where.com | awk something
or
curl www.some.where.com | grep something
But you want to put that into a variable, so you need to do
var=$(curl www.some.where.com | awk something)
or
var=$(curl www.some.where.com | grep something)
The actual command I think you want is
var=$(curl www.some.where.com | awk -F\" '/au_pxytimetag/{print $(NF-1)}')
Then you want to use the variable var for another curl operation, so you will need to do
curl -d "param1=$var" http://some.url.com/somewhere
Original answer
I'd use awk like this:
var=$(awk -F\" '/au_pxytimetag/{print $(NF-1)}' yourfile)
to take second to last field on line containing au_pxytimetag using " as field separator.
Then you can use it like this
curl -d "param1=$var&param2=SomethingElse" http://some.url.com/somewhere

Answer 2

You can use xmllint:
value=$(xmllint --html --xpath "string(//input[#name='au_pxytimetag']/#value)" index.html)

Answer 3

You can do it with my Xidel:
xidel http://webpage -e "//input[#name='au_pxytimetag']/#value"
But you do not need to.
With
xidel http://webpage -f "(//form)[1]" -e "//what-you-need-from-the-next-page"
you can send all values from the first form on the webpage to the form action and then you can query something from the next page

Answer 4

You can try:
grep au_pxytimetag input.html | sed "s/.* value=\"\(.*\)\".*/\1/"
EDIT:
If you need this on a script:
#!/bin/bash
DATA=$(grep au_pxytimetag input.html | sed "s/.* value=\"\(.*\)\".*/\1/")
curl http://example.com -d $DATA