I’m having a devil of a time trying to scrape an onerous website with
Scrubyt/Mechanize.
Changing the site’s policies is out of scope, so I need to try to find
some way to work around them.
I think the problem is centered around the site’s use of schemes.
HTTPS is often used in place of https, for instance. I’m not a Ruby
wizard, but I’ve patched Mechanize at line 429, line 439, and line
466. On 466 i’ve put
if uri.scheme == 'https|HTTPS' && ! http_obj.started?
I assume this is right but like I said, i’m a Nuby. 
Anyway, the site does the following. After the below output, Ruby
times out in rbuf_fill. I assume it’s not really following the
redirect, and my patching is wrong, but I can’t be certain.
Regardless of whether I use scrubyt or mechanize natively, the
symptoms are the same. My script looks like:
page = agent.get(‘http://accounts.xxxx.org’)
form = page.forms.find {|f| f.name == “frmInput”}
form.fields.find {|f| f.name == ‘Name’}.value = ‘xxxx’
form.fields.find {|f| f.name == ‘Password’}.value = ‘xxxx’
puts page.forms
page = agent.submit(form, form.buttons.first)
after the obvious initialization.
Does anyone have any clues? I’m at wits end here.
Parked at Loopia is the output.