Can Scraper (Rust) interact with forms on webpages?

As of my last update, Scraper is a Rust crate that provides an interface to work with HTML based on the html5ever and selectors libraries. It is primarily designed to parse and extract information from HTML documents and does not have the capabilities to interact with web pages or forms in the way a browser or headless browser automation tool would.

Interacting with forms on web pages typically involves not just parsing HTML, but also executing JavaScript, maintaining a session, handling cookies, and possibly dealing with AJAX calls. Scraper does not have these capabilities because it is not a browser engine; it's a parsing library.

To programmatically interact with forms on web pages in Rust, you would typically use a headless browser automation tool such as Selenium with WebDriver or a headless browser like headless Chrome/Firefox in combination with a Rust library that can control it.

If you're looking for a way to interact with forms using Rust, you might want to consider using the fantoccini crate, which is a high-level API for controlling a browser through the WebDriver protocol.

Here's a simple example of how you can use fantoccini to interact with a form:

use fantoccini::{Client, Locator};

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() -> Result<(), fantoccini::error::CmdError> {
    // Start a WebDriver session (e.g., with chromedriver running on port 9515)
    let mut client = Client::new("http://localhost:9515").await.expect("failed to connect to WebDriver");

    // Navigate to the webpage with the form
    client.goto("https://example.com/form_page").await?;

    // Fill out the form fields
    client.form(Locator::Css("form#my_form")).await?
        .set_by_name("username", "example_user").await?
        .set_by_name("password", "example_password").await?
        // ... set other fields as needed

    // Submit the form
    client.form(Locator::Css("form#my_form")).await?.submit().await?;

    // Optionally, you can check the resulting page for confirmation
    let success_message = client.text(Locator::Css("#success_message")).await?;
    println!("Form submitted successfully: {}", success_message);

    // Close the browser session
    client.close().await
}

Keep in mind that the above example assumes you have a WebDriver-compatible browser (like chromedriver for Chrome or geckodriver for Firefox) running and accessible at the specified URL.

For fully interactive scenarios with complex JavaScript or dynamic content, you may need to use a more feature-rich browser automation tool, possibly outside of the Rust ecosystem. In such cases, you could consider using tools like Selenium with a language binding that supports these features, such as Python, Java, or JavaScript.