WWW::Mechanize-like package for Haskell

[nominolo@…]

Provide a framework that can serve as a basis for intelligent web agents / bots. This means it should provide means to simulate an interaction with a web site:

• retrieving web-sites, handling forwarding, cookies and similar user-agent features
• provide easy means to fill out forms or set up other kinds of requests
• query documents, e.g. by tag, by id, by class, etc.; search for contents

A lot of functionality might already be available through other libraries and just has to be put together in a nice way.

[Of course this library can be used for things like spam-Bots, but I think there are a lot of legitimate applications, too ;) ]

[nominolo]

I think it's doable as a GSoC project, but working on basic network libraries (ByteString?-support, Unicode) is more likely to be accepted.

[eelco]

Seems 'shpider' might fulfill this request:  http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/shpider

[tibbe]

A little bit too specialized. To be really useful it also requires a student with good API design skills (which students tend to lack).