Since it is hard to accurately analyze an HTML form by hand, and since the importance of submitting a form correctly is critical, you may prefer to use a tool to analyze the format of forms. This book’s website has a form handler that provides this service. The form analyzer works by substituting the form’s original form handler with the URL of the form analyzer. When the analyzer receives form data, it creates a web page that describes the method, data variables, and cookies sent by the form exactly as they are seen by the original form handler, even if the web page uses JavaScript.

To use the emulator, you must first create a copy of the web page that contains the form you want to analyze, and place that copy on your hard drive. Then you must replace the form handler on the web page with a form handler that will analyze the form structure. For example, if the form you want to analyze has a <form> tag like the one in Example 6-9, you must substitute the original form handler with the address of my form analyzer, as shown in Example 6-10.