Shell Programming and Scripting

Not really sure if this is the place to ask or if I am asking the correct question.

I want to create a script (ksh) on solaris. This will be a menu based script for the user and they will only give on input, a customer number.
ie ./my_script 112233
Thats the easy bit which obviously i can do..

What i need to do with the number is post a url to a server
eg http://customerserver.com/cgi-bin/ge...details/112233

I could just use this url in a browser and I would get results in a page with some xml and then the customer details. I need to be able to post this via a script to the server, and for the script to be able to read the response and then some way for me to interpret the results so I can present in a readable friendly manner to the user that runs the script in stead of a whole load of xml returned....

Any ideas how I get started with this? I know mainly ksh, small bit of perl but not a whole lot....

look into installing 'wget' - Solaris doesn't come with the 'wget' installed.
'wget' will allow you to do a 'post' against the server.

If you already have a sample XML 'reply' from a server, you can write a parser to extract relative/needed information and display it in a 'user-friendly' way.