During my schooldays, I had a classmate. Let’s call him/her X. We always used to compete fiercely for 1st rank in school exams.

Fast forward school. Now in college. 3 years zoomed off, I didn’t hear anything about X.

As humans, we tend to be interested in stories of our old rivals. I’m no different. I wanted to know how X has been doing in college.

In India, exam results are often indication of one’s brilliance and success. Though, I thoroughly disagree with that notion, I started to wonder, is there any way I could get results of X? It could be a good weekend project.

From mutual friends, I got to know that X was pursuing B. Sc in VSNGU.

I opened their result website. http://vnsgu.ac.in/vnsguexam/

Nothing fancy. Pretty old website built on PHP, served by Apache server. Next, their result page.

Wow! No authentication here, result of all candidates was publicly available. Most websites will ask for birth date.

You just enter seat number and you’ll get scorecard in jiffy. Cool!

Remember my goal? I wanted to see result of X. I don’t have X’s seat number however.

Solution: Bruteforcing.

Iterate through all seat numbers’ result one by one, match each record with X’s name. When there’s match, terminate the loop.

As I had experience of scraping data with PHP cURL, writing script to iterate through each result record was simple task. Here’s how I did it:

<?php

//Simple HTML DOM parser to manipulate HTML
include_once '../class/simplehtmldom/simple_html_dom.php'; 

//To store cookies, just in case
$cookie_file_path = "cookie.txt"; 

//Start from first seat number
$i=1; 

$ch = curl_init();

//We have total 3281 candidates
for($i=1; $i<3281; $i++) { 
 curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_POST, TRUE);
 //Send post request for every seat number
 curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "seat=$i&submit=Submit"); 
 curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE); 
 curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0); 
 curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1); 
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, TRUE); 
 curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $cookie_file_path); 
 curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $cookie_file_path);

 //URL of result page 
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,'http://vnsgu.ac.in/vnsguexam/result/science/BSCSEM5/bscsem5o.php'); 
 $output1 = curl_exec($ch);

 $html = str_get_html($output1);

 $ret = $html->find('table[width=900] td b');

 if(count($ret) == 0) continue;

 $seat = explode(": &nbsp;", $ret[3]);

 $towrite = $ret[0].";".$ret[1].";".$ret[2].";".$seat[1]."\r\n";
 
 //This file will have list of all candidates, their seat number and college name
 $file = 'data.txt'; 
 file_put_contents($file, $towrite, FILE_APPEND);
}
?>

I uploaded script on server, executed and done! I had data of all candidates in text file.

CTRL + F and I found our X!

Mission accomplished.