How to make a script that analyse a countdown timer on a webpage?

palmhoej

So there is this new site were you can place a bid on and item and every bid drives the price up marginally, but its gonna cost you a small fee (yes it is a kind of ponzi scheme, but legal in my country!). Every time one bid is placed the auction run for additionally 30 sec, giving time for the next bid. So of course if you are smart you will only bid at the last possible second. It has just started, so there are not so many bidders yet, which means that i if you sit and watch (for ever) you can actually land some products for 5 % of the normal retail price (we managed to do so!). But why sit and watch if you could write a script that place the bid at the last second?

So basically i need something that can capture the countdown clock and everytime its > 1 sec it should click my mouse (or send the url for the bid buttom). But i don't know if this is possible to do in processing?

Could someone point me in the right direction?

blindfish

I imagine it's possible; but it would be far simpler to use web technology directly. For instance you can run scripts directly in the browser console. Checking the value of an element in the DOM every n milliseconds is trivial. The more tricky bit would be invoking the click; but if testing tools like PhantomJS can do it I'm sure it's possible...

The moral/legal implications of what you are asking are not so simple :(|)