Author Topic: How to find the source of text outputted by a webpage  (Read 1227 times)

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Offline m0l0ko

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How to find the source of text outputted by a webpage
« on: September 08, 2013, 06:18:06 pm »
Here is the webpage:
[LINK REMOVED]

I'm trying to figure out where these articles are stored. They are not stored in the database. So I'm guessing they are stored in an XML file somewhere. What would be the easiest way of figuring out where exactly the website is getting the text for that article from? I tried using the firefox plugin TamperData to read the GET header being sent, but it didn't gimme any information about where this text is actually stored. I know I could just use linux grep command to search for what file contains this text, but there has to be an easier way to do it.
« Last Edit: September 11, 2013, 07:19:26 pm by m0l0ko »

Offline namespace7

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Re: How to find the source of text outputted by a webpage
« Reply #1 on: September 08, 2013, 10:19:44 pm »
What makes you think that they are not stored in a database?

"A programmer’s greatest enemy isn’t the tools or the boss or the artists or the design or the legacy code or the third party code or the API or the OS. A programmer’s greatest enemy is getting stuck.
Therefore a crucial step to becoming a better programmer is learning how to avoid getting stuck, to recognize when you’re stuck, and to get unstuck." -Jeff Wofford

Offline m0l0ko

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Re: How to find the source of text outputted by a webpage
« Reply #2 on: September 11, 2013, 07:30:43 pm »
I have access to the database. I used a program called ApexSQL Search to search for particular strings (the outputted text) in every field of every table in the DB, and nothing came up. Not even the titles of the articles are in there. Heres where it gets really weird: I decided to download the whole site to my computer with FTP, then I ran:
Code: [Select]
grep -l -i 'TEXT IM LOOKING FOR' /path/to/site/*/*.*and I made sure it scanned every single subdirectory (i.e. I ran it on /path/to/site/*/*/*.* and /path/to/site/*/*/*/*.*) etc. Bizarrely enough, I couldn't find the articles. I could find some of the article titles stored in these .resource files for some reason, but the articles themselves where nowhere to be found.
The site is made with DotNetNuke CMS (which is a monstrosity of a CMS), and the module which displays the articles is called XMod. There are at least 2,000 of these articles, if they are not stored in some kinda text files (i.e. XML) on the server, then where else could they be stored? I used TamperData to read the headers and I didn't see any GET requests sent to an external site.

I got what I needed from this site another way, but I still would like to know how to easily find the source of text outputted by a web page. For example if the site gets the data from a MySQL database, or an XML file etc.

« Last Edit: September 11, 2013, 07:33:39 pm by m0l0ko »

Offline Stackprotector

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Re: How to find the source of text outputted by a webpage
« Reply #3 on: September 11, 2013, 09:29:24 pm »
You will need to read the settings/code of the cms. That easy. You might even be looking in the wrong database or the good database might be out of your reach.
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