Greetings all,

I am in the midst of a research project and am in need of some wisdom. I am required to surf to a number of websites and look at various forms in an effort to locate specific fields and extract the values that are available for users to select (ie. values in drop-down lists, radio buttons, check boxes, etc.). This is very manual work (clicking and typing into word or excel) and I thought that someone might be able to give me some pointers on how to make this easier.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Kevin
aka. ChubChub

One idea might be to write a favelet/bookmarklet that writes out the values you want. You'd still have to load each web page and then run the script, of course.

Another idea might be to create a web indexing bot, similar to this one: http://code.google.com/webstats/index.html

I think this is a bit over my head. I got a tip from a friend of mine suggesting I "look at the HTML source, search on some keywords (like "SELECT" or "OPTION") and when you find the appropriate element (drop-down list or radio buttons), you can copy/paste the HTML defining the element somewhere"

I'm going to try this first, thanks for the suggestion though.

That's how I would do it. Beats writing each option down manually.
Some simple Find & Replace can help you get rid of the tags or some editors have an option that strips HTML. Then you have a nice list of option values.