Using Tcl to write WWW client side applications

Purpose: Discuss the various ways Tcl can be used to write WWW client side applications.

Using Tcl to write WWW client side applications within the WWW browser


Tcl can be used to write 'agent' software - that walks WWW pages, scrapes info from the HTML, and the reformats it for display. I know there was a WebTechnique article on this - anyone have pointers? The Article is from the March 2000 issue of WebTechniques. It is called "Writing Intelligent Web Agents" and can be found at http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/2000/03/schrenk/ .

Tcl can be used to write WWW browsers - see Browsex [L1 ] for the latest effort.

Tcl comes with an http library, which allows you to write tools to read data rather easily. You do have to find an HTML parsing library. Someone I hope will provide some pointers here to good places to find such things.


Notice that Michael Doyle and Hattie Schroeder's BOOK Interactive Web Applications with Tcl/Tk not only focuses on this topic, but includes a complete open-source Tk-coded browser

MDD: The source was included on the CD with the book. The examples from the book are available at http://www.eolas.net/tcl/examples/tclbook-examples.zip


Did anyone ever notice the HTML 4.01 reference document's references to Tcl? See http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/interact/scripts.html !

A finer granularity treatment of this topic can be found Using Tcl to write WWW client side applications within the WWW browser; This page would be used to talk about non-browser solutions - I guess web scrapers, embedded html browsers, etc.? [Is that supposed to say "within" or "without"?]


  • www : High level HTTP client library
  • rl_http: A REST-capable, never-blocking HTTP client package that supports HTTPS, deflate, chunked encoding
  • http: client-side implementation of the HTTP/1.1 protocol
  • tclwebtest: Tool to write automated tests for web applications.