How to automate routine work?

Question

Automation

Good afternoon.
There is a need to automate my current work, but unfortunately I do not quite know how to do it. I see several ways, and in any of them I am ready to independently study the required knowledge.
Briefly: I work as a remote employee in a transport company. I place bids on reverse auction sites where performers (carriers) offer the best conditions for customers (people who need transportation from point A to point B).
Logic of work:
There are two directions, work with the site and with mail.
Working with the site:
1) Go to the site itself, as a rule, I do this through the browser tab.
2) Check the correctness of the selected category, and work with it (on site 1 it is possible to create a filter by combining several categories and display a list. For convenience, 4 filters were created)
A field appears in front of us with all the offers in a short version. There are 30 offers on one page, as a rule, 2 pages are required to be processed in one visit. The proposals are divided into columns, and we are interested in the sections: “What we are transporting”, “Where”, “Cost”, sometimes others.
3) It is required to determine whether this is our bet, in fact, the work of yes / no logic. For example, if in the Russian Federation, then yes, then you need to open the proposal in more detail, if not, go to the next one.
Thus, we need to go over all the bets in order to determine which are suitable for us, which are not, and those that are suitable, to consider in more detail.
4) Next comes the process of more detailed processing. We look at the details of the order, see if it suits us, again yes / no, but more parameters. And we go to the next
5) It is worth noting here that points 3 and 4 are “processed” in several parameters at the same time, i.e. if our direction, but not our cargo, then ignore, and if vice versa, then also ignore, our bet is made if both the cargo and the direction are ours. Sometimes up to 6-7 parameters should be taken into account.
6) After processing, in the form of item 4, you need to enter our offer, and select a couple of items from the drop-down lists, again, depending on what kind of order it is. In one case, one point is needed, in the second, another.
7) After we return to point 2, change the category and on a new one until we exhaust everything.
Mail work:
Notifications come to the mail, and they need to be forwarded, depending on the text inside. The difficulty is that I have not found a really working email client that can correctly recognize the text inside. I searched quite tightly, but each time, the client missed a number of letters. After, text recognition, it would be great if we again, using the yes / no / if / logic, did different actions.
The whole point is that a certain tool takes data from the browser (text and numbers), saves them somewhere, then processes them according to the yes / no / if logic, after this analysis makes a decision, then to click in the browser, enter the value or just close the tab.
What solutions do I think might work?
1) Write a program that takes all the data from the site through the Parser. After that, it would filter the data by narrower criteria, apply yes / no / if logic, and pass the command to its module that inserts the values ​​into the browser.
It seems to me that there is a bunch of C ++ (the program itself) and PHP (parsing and pulling data) + JavaScript (click script, enter value)
2) A C ++ program that takes screenshots, recognizes them in FineReader, selects the necessary text fields, and further processes them.
3) Convince the site admins to provide an API, and it seems like you can do everything with it, but I don’t know how to work with the API at all
I ask you not to throw tomatoes at me, but just tell me whether my thoughts are correct in principle, whether it is possible to implement this and what kind of steppe to dig into. Everything I don’t know, I’m ready to learn, but I would like an understanding from specialists that this may require.
Thanks again in advance.
UPD Please, if there are any specific recommendations, not on the shelves how to do this, but at least in what steppe to dig, I will be very grateful.

Answer 1

1. The parser is the best. There are many specialists on the same freelance. It can be either a separate parser in any language, or a browser-based parser only in Javascript.
2. Forget the screenshot and recognition, I don’t know how you could have come up with this :)
3. There is nothing complicated with the api either, any programmer will help.
4. Regarding mail, I don’t know which clients how, but I have a smart box on my poppy, you can put any filters and assign any action if the filters pass. You can even execute scripts..

Answer 2

1. The parser can immediately view the HTML code, this excludes FineReader.
2. You can pull out letters using regular expressions.

Answer 3

well, if you work with the site - it will be easiest to install PHP with curl, and writing all the functionality on the site will take 2-3 days for a beginner. To work, you will need some kind of PHP-enabled server (from ready-made ones, for example, for wine - Denver, for a beginner, that’s it)
so first, google:
1) How to get a page from someone else’s site using curl
or
parsing pages using simple_html_dom
2) look at the source page code with adding your order, figuring out how post / get forms work, again we smoke Google on the subject of "curl post form cookie"
3) we think a lot, write even more
4) profit...