How to fill out form data on a website

I am looking to develop an app that will take login details from the user, go to a website, login, return values on the web page and then display them to the user on the phone.

Does java have this functionallity? Will I need to use javascript instead maybe? do these answers depend on the website that I am trying to access?

In my head I figure that I could just read in the pa开发者_Python百科ramaters as strings or chars, parse the webpage for the appropriate form and "paste" the appropriate value into the form "box". However, I have never attempted anything like this with coding so I am completely new to the idea and dont really know where to start. I tried googling around but any information that I found was either irrelevant or conflicting.

I'm not looking for the code to do it because I will not really learn anythig from that but a finger in the right direction would be great. I really do want to try get better at programming so that's why I've started to give myself these little side projects

Any help that can be offered would be great

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Ian, You can try using http-client (http://hc.apache.org/httpclient-3.x/) lib from apache. It lets to pro grammatically access a website (from a Java code). You will need to do the following things

1. Use the http-client lib to POST the data to the web site.
2. Receive the html response.
3. Use some html parser or xpath to retrieve the values from the response html.

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You would need a script which accesses the webpage and enters the data, but in my opinion this is illegal. Because you are accessing a secured area and are able to look into sensitive data. Also accessing the page via a script is "botting" - most pages have safety precautions to prevent the execution of scripts, because most of them are harmful. In my opinion there is no legal and easy solution to this.