6.45pm. Its done. The data mining/extraction script I have been working on in Perl is finally complete. Last week I set myself a goal of automating the search process that we as website users perform daily. I went to work and set myself up a dummy search site and had a play. A couple of days later (along with a few beers along the way) I have accomplished the following:

* The ability to login into access controlled sites that use session tracking.
* Download a copy of every searchable record, starting with an id 1 and ending with 10000.
* Extract the data from the local files, and build a CSV file.
* Clean up the CSV file, removing all null entries, and blank lines.

The end result?

A 700 line CSV containing information I require from an external searchable system.

Now where's that beer....