Provided by: libwww-perl_6.05-2_all bug

NAME

       lwptut -- An LWP Tutorial

DESCRIPTION

       LWP (short for "Library for WWW in Perl") is a very popular group of Perl modules for
       accessing data on the Web. Like most Perl module-distributions, each of LWP's component
       modules comes with documentation that is a complete reference to its interface. However,
       there are so many modules in LWP that it's hard to know where to start looking for
       information on how to do even the simplest most common things.

       Really introducing you to using LWP would require a whole book -- a book that just happens
       to exist, called Perl & LWP. But this article should give you a taste of how you can go
       about some common tasks with LWP.

   Getting documents with LWP::Simple
       If you just want to get what's at a particular URL, the simplest way to do it is
       LWP::Simple's functions.

       In a Perl program, you can call its "get($url)" function.  It will try getting that URL's
       content.  If it works, then it'll return the content; but if there's some error, it'll
       return undef.

         my $url = 'http://www.npr.org/programs/fa/?todayDate=current';
           # Just an example: the URL for the most recent /Fresh Air/ show

         use LWP::Simple;
         my $content = get $url;
         die "Couldn't get $url" unless defined $content;

         # Then go do things with $content, like this:

         if($content =~ m/jazz/i) {
           print "They're talking about jazz today on Fresh Air!\n";
         }
         else {
           print "Fresh Air is apparently jazzless today.\n";
         }

       The handiest variant on "get" is "getprint", which is useful in Perl one-liners.  If it
       can get the page whose URL you provide, it sends it to STDOUT; otherwise it complains to
       STDERR.

         % perl -MLWP::Simple -e "getprint 'http://www.cpan.org/RECENT'"

       That is the URL of a plain text file that lists new files in CPAN in the past two weeks.
       You can easily make it part of a tidy little shell command, like this one that mails you
       the list of new "Acme::" modules:

         % perl -MLWP::Simple -e "getprint 'http://www.cpan.org/RECENT'"  \
            | grep "/by-module/Acme" | mail -s "New Acme modules! Joy!" $USER

       There are other useful functions in LWP::Simple, including one function for running a HEAD
       request on a URL (useful for checking links, or getting the last-revised time of a URL),
       and two functions for saving/mirroring a URL to a local file. See the LWP::Simple
       documentation for the full details, or chapter 2 of Perl & LWP for more examples.

   The Basics of the LWP Class Model
       LWP::Simple's functions are handy for simple cases, but its functions don't support
       cookies or authorization, don't support setting header lines in the HTTP request,
       generally don't support reading header lines in the HTTP response (notably the full HTTP
       error message, in case of an error). To get at all those features, you'll have to use the
       full LWP class model.

       While LWP consists of dozens of classes, the main two that you have to understand are
       LWP::UserAgent and HTTP::Response. LWP::UserAgent is a class for "virtual browsers" which
       you use for performing requests, and HTTP::Response is a class for the responses (or error
       messages) that you get back from those requests.

       The basic idiom is "$response = $browser->get($url)", or more fully illustrated:

         # Early in your program:

         use LWP 5.64; # Loads all important LWP classes, and makes
                       #  sure your version is reasonably recent.

         my $browser = LWP::UserAgent->new;

         ...

         # Then later, whenever you need to make a get request:
         my $url = 'http://www.npr.org/programs/fa/?todayDate=current';

         my $response = $browser->get( $url );
         die "Can't get $url -- ", $response->status_line
          unless $response->is_success;

         die "Hey, I was expecting HTML, not ", $response->content_type
          unless $response->content_type eq 'text/html';
            # or whatever content-type you're equipped to deal with

         # Otherwise, process the content somehow:

         if($response->decoded_content =~ m/jazz/i) {
           print "They're talking about jazz today on Fresh Air!\n";
         }
         else {
           print "Fresh Air is apparently jazzless today.\n";
         }

       There are two objects involved: $browser, which holds an object of class LWP::UserAgent,
       and then the $response object, which is of class HTTP::Response. You really need only one
       browser object per program; but every time you make a request, you get back a new
       HTTP::Response object, which will have some interesting attributes:

       •   A status code indicating success or failure (which you can test with
           "$response->is_success").

       •   An HTTP status line that is hopefully informative if there's failure (which you can
           see with "$response->status_line", returning something like "404 Not Found").

       •   A MIME content-type like "text/html", "image/gif", "application/xml", etc., which you
           can see with "$response->content_type"

       •   The actual content of the response, in "$response->decoded_content".  If the response
           is HTML, that's where the HTML source will be; if it's a GIF, then
           "$response->decoded_content" will be the binary GIF data.

       •   And dozens of other convenient and more specific methods that are documented in the
           docs for HTTP::Response, and its superclasses HTTP::Message and HTTP::Headers.

   Adding Other HTTP Request Headers
       The most commonly used syntax for requests is "$response = $browser->get($url)", but in
       truth, you can add extra HTTP header lines to the request by adding a list of key-value
       pairs after the URL, like so:

         $response = $browser->get( $url, $key1, $value1, $key2, $value2, ... );

       For example, here's how to send some more Netscape-like headers, in case you're dealing
       with a site that would otherwise reject your request:

         my @ns_headers = (
          'User-Agent' => 'Mozilla/4.76 [en] (Win98; U)',
          'Accept' => 'image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, image/png, */*',
          'Accept-Charset' => 'iso-8859-1,*,utf-8',
          'Accept-Language' => 'en-US',
         );

         ...

         $response = $browser->get($url, @ns_headers);

       If you weren't reusing that array, you could just go ahead and do this:

         $response = $browser->get($url,
          'User-Agent' => 'Mozilla/4.76 [en] (Win98; U)',
          'Accept' => 'image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, image/png, */*',
          'Accept-Charset' => 'iso-8859-1,*,utf-8',
          'Accept-Language' => 'en-US',
         );

       If you were only ever changing the 'User-Agent' line, you could just change the $browser
       object's default line from "libwww-perl/5.65" (or the like) to whatever you like, using
       the LWP::UserAgent "agent" method:

          $browser->agent('Mozilla/4.76 [en] (Win98; U)');

   Enabling Cookies
       A default LWP::UserAgent object acts like a browser with its cookies support turned off.
       There are various ways of turning it on, by setting its "cookie_jar" attribute. A "cookie
       jar" is an object representing a little database of all the HTTP cookies that a browser
       can know about. It can correspond to a file on disk (the way Netscape uses its cookies.txt
       file), or it can be just an in-memory object that starts out empty, and whose collection
       of cookies will disappear once the program is finished running.

       To give a browser an in-memory empty cookie jar, you set its "cookie_jar" attribute like
       so:

         $browser->cookie_jar({});

       To give it a copy that will be read from a file on disk, and will be saved to it when the
       program is finished running, set the "cookie_jar" attribute like this:

         use HTTP::Cookies;
         $browser->cookie_jar( HTTP::Cookies->new(
           'file' => '/some/where/cookies.lwp',
               # where to read/write cookies
           'autosave' => 1,
               # save it to disk when done
         ));

       That file will be an LWP-specific format. If you want to be access the cookies in your
       Netscape cookies file, you can use the HTTP::Cookies::Netscape class:

         use HTTP::Cookies;
           # yes, loads HTTP::Cookies::Netscape too

         $browser->cookie_jar( HTTP::Cookies::Netscape->new(
           'file' => 'c:/Program Files/Netscape/Users/DIR-NAME-HERE/cookies.txt',
               # where to read cookies
         ));

       You could add an "'autosave' => 1" line as further above, but at time of writing, it's
       uncertain whether Netscape might discard some of the cookies you could be writing back to
       disk.

   Posting Form Data
       Many HTML forms send data to their server using an HTTP POST request, which you can send
       with this syntax:

        $response = $browser->post( $url,
          [
            formkey1 => value1,
            formkey2 => value2,
            ...
          ],
        );

       Or if you need to send HTTP headers:

        $response = $browser->post( $url,
          [
            formkey1 => value1,
            formkey2 => value2,
            ...
          ],
          headerkey1 => value1,
          headerkey2 => value2,
        );

       For example, the following program makes a search request to AltaVista (by sending some
       form data via an HTTP POST request), and extracts from the HTML the report of the number
       of matches:

         use strict;
         use warnings;
         use LWP 5.64;
         my $browser = LWP::UserAgent->new;

         my $word = 'tarragon';

         my $url = 'http://search.yahoo.com/yhs/search';
         my $response = $browser->post( $url,
           [ 'q' => $word,  # the Altavista query string
             'fr' => 'altavista', 'pg' => 'q', 'avkw' => 'tgz', 'kl' => 'XX',
           ]
         );
         die "$url error: ", $response->status_line
          unless $response->is_success;
         die "Weird content type at $url -- ", $response->content_type
          unless $response->content_is_html;

         if( $response->decoded_content =~ m{([0-9,]+)(?:<.*?>)? results for} ) {
           # The substring will be like "996,000</strong> results for"
           print "$word: $1\n";
         }
         else {
           print "Couldn't find the match-string in the response\n";
         }

   Sending GET Form Data
       Some HTML forms convey their form data not by sending the data in an HTTP POST request,
       but by making a normal GET request with the data stuck on the end of the URL.  For
       example, if you went to "www.imdb.com" and ran a search on "Blade Runner", the URL you'd
       see in your browser window would be:

         http://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=Blade+Runner

       To run the same search with LWP, you'd use this idiom, which involves the URI class:

         use URI;
         my $url = URI->new( 'http://www.imdb.com/find' );
           # makes an object representing the URL

         $url->query_form(  # And here the form data pairs:
           'q' => 'Blade Runner',
           's' => 'all',
         );

         my $response = $browser->get($url);

       See chapter 5 of Perl & LWP for a longer discussion of HTML forms and of form data, and
       chapters 6 through 9 for a longer discussion of extracting data from HTML.

   Absolutizing URLs
       The URI class that we just mentioned above provides all sorts of methods for accessing and
       modifying parts of URLs (such as asking sort of URL it is with "$url->scheme", and asking
       what host it refers to with "$url->host", and so on, as described in the docs for the URI
       class.  However, the methods of most immediate interest are the "query_form" method seen
       above, and now the "new_abs" method for taking a probably-relative URL string (like
       "../foo.html") and getting back an absolute URL (like
       "http://www.perl.com/stuff/foo.html"), as shown here:

         use URI;
         $abs = URI->new_abs($maybe_relative, $base);

       For example, consider this program that matches URLs in the HTML list of new modules in
       CPAN:

         use strict;
         use warnings;
         use LWP;
         my $browser = LWP::UserAgent->new;

         my $url = 'http://www.cpan.org/RECENT.html';
         my $response = $browser->get($url);
         die "Can't get $url -- ", $response->status_line
          unless $response->is_success;

         my $html = $response->decoded_content;
         while( $html =~ m/<A HREF=\"(.*?)\"/g ) {
           print "$1\n";
         }

       When run, it emits output that starts out something like this:

         MIRRORING.FROM
         RECENT
         RECENT.html
         authors/00whois.html
         authors/01mailrc.txt.gz
         authors/id/A/AA/AASSAD/CHECKSUMS
         ...

       However, if you actually want to have those be absolute URLs, you can use the URI module's
       "new_abs" method, by changing the "while" loop to this:

         while( $html =~ m/<A HREF=\"(.*?)\"/g ) {
           print URI->new_abs( $1, $response->base ) ,"\n";
         }

       (The "$response->base" method from HTTP::Message is for returning what URL should be used
       for resolving relative URLs -- it's usually just the same as the URL that you requested.)

       That program then emits nicely absolute URLs:

         http://www.cpan.org/MIRRORING.FROM
         http://www.cpan.org/RECENT
         http://www.cpan.org/RECENT.html
         http://www.cpan.org/authors/00whois.html
         http://www.cpan.org/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz
         http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/A/AA/AASSAD/CHECKSUMS
         ...

       See chapter 4 of Perl & LWP for a longer discussion of URI objects.

       Of course, using a regexp to match hrefs is a bit simplistic, and for more robust
       programs, you'll probably want to use an HTML-parsing module like HTML::LinkExtor or
       HTML::TokeParser or even maybe HTML::TreeBuilder.

   Other Browser Attributes
       LWP::UserAgent objects have many attributes for controlling how they work.  Here are a few
       notable ones:

       •   "$browser->timeout(15);"

           This sets this browser object to give up on requests that don't answer within 15
           seconds.

       •   "$browser->protocols_allowed( [ 'http', 'gopher'] );"

           This sets this browser object to not speak any protocols other than HTTP and gopher.
           If it tries accessing any other kind of URL (like an "ftp:" or "mailto:" or "news:"
           URL), then it won't actually try connecting, but instead will immediately return an
           error code 500, with a message like "Access to 'ftp' URIs has been disabled".

       •   "use LWP::ConnCache; $browser->conn_cache(LWP::ConnCache->new());"

           This tells the browser object to try using the HTTP/1.1 "Keep-Alive" feature, which
           speeds up requests by reusing the same socket connection for multiple requests to the
           same server.

       •   "$browser->agent( 'SomeName/1.23 (more info here maybe)' )"

           This changes how the browser object will identify itself in the default "User-Agent"
           line is its HTTP requests.  By default, it'll send "libwww-perl/versionnumber", like
           "libwww-perl/5.65".  You can change that to something more descriptive like this:

             $browser->agent( 'SomeName/3.14 (contact@robotplexus.int)' );

           Or if need be, you can go in disguise, like this:

             $browser->agent( 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.12; Mac_PowerPC)' );

       •   "push @{ $ua->requests_redirectable }, 'POST';"

           This tells this browser to obey redirection responses to POST requests (like most
           modern interactive browsers), even though the HTTP RFC says that should not normally
           be done.

       For more options and information, see the full documentation for LWP::UserAgent.

   Writing Polite Robots
       If you want to make sure that your LWP-based program respects robots.txt files and doesn't
       make too many requests too fast, you can use the LWP::RobotUA class instead of the
       LWP::UserAgent class.

       LWP::RobotUA class is just like LWP::UserAgent, and you can use it like so:

         use LWP::RobotUA;
         my $browser = LWP::RobotUA->new('YourSuperBot/1.34', 'you@yoursite.com');
           # Your bot's name and your email address

         my $response = $browser->get($url);

       But HTTP::RobotUA adds these features:

       •   If the robots.txt on $url's server forbids you from accessing $url, then the $browser
           object (assuming it's of class LWP::RobotUA) won't actually request it, but instead
           will give you back (in $response) a 403 error with a message "Forbidden by
           robots.txt".  That is, if you have this line:

             die "$url -- ", $response->status_line, "\nAborted"
              unless $response->is_success;

           then the program would die with an error message like this:

             http://whatever.site.int/pith/x.html -- 403 Forbidden by robots.txt
             Aborted at whateverprogram.pl line 1234

       •   If this $browser object sees that the last time it talked to $url's server was too
           recently, then it will pause (via "sleep") to avoid making too many requests too
           often. How long it will pause for, is by default one minute -- but you can control it
           with the "$browser->delay( minutes )" attribute.

           For example, this code:

             $browser->delay( 7/60 );

           ...means that this browser will pause when it needs to avoid talking to any given
           server more than once every 7 seconds.

       For more options and information, see the full documentation for LWP::RobotUA.

   Using Proxies
       In some cases, you will want to (or will have to) use proxies for accessing certain sites
       and/or using certain protocols. This is most commonly the case when your LWP program is
       running (or could be running) on a machine that is behind a firewall.

       To make a browser object use proxies that are defined in the usual environment variables
       ("HTTP_PROXY", etc.), just call the "env_proxy" on a user-agent object before you go
       making any requests on it.  Specifically:

         use LWP::UserAgent;
         my $browser = LWP::UserAgent->new;

         # And before you go making any requests:
         $browser->env_proxy;

       For more information on proxy parameters, see the LWP::UserAgent documentation,
       specifically the "proxy", "env_proxy", and "no_proxy" methods.

   HTTP Authentication
       Many web sites restrict access to documents by using "HTTP Authentication". This isn't
       just any form of "enter your password" restriction, but is a specific mechanism where the
       HTTP server sends the browser an HTTP code that says "That document is part of a protected
       'realm', and you can access it only if you re-request it and add some special
       authorization headers to your request".

       For example, the Unicode.org admins stop email-harvesting bots from harvesting the
       contents of their mailing list archives, by protecting them with HTTP Authentication, and
       then publicly stating the username and password (at "http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/")
       -- namely username "unicode-ml" and password "unicode".

       For example, consider this URL, which is part of the protected area of the web site:

         http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2002-m08/0067.html

       If you access that with a browser, you'll get a prompt like "Enter username and password
       for 'Unicode-MailList-Archives' at server 'www.unicode.org'".

       In LWP, if you just request that URL, like this:

         use LWP;
         my $browser = LWP::UserAgent->new;

         my $url =
          'http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2002-m08/0067.html';
         my $response = $browser->get($url);

         die "Error: ", $response->header('WWW-Authenticate') || 'Error accessing',
           #  ('WWW-Authenticate' is the realm-name)
           "\n ", $response->status_line, "\n at $url\n Aborting"
          unless $response->is_success;

       Then you'll get this error:

         Error: Basic realm="Unicode-MailList-Archives"
          401 Authorization Required
          at http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2002-m08/0067.html
          Aborting at auth1.pl line 9.  [or wherever]

       ...because the $browser doesn't know any the username and password for that realm
       ("Unicode-MailList-Archives") at that host ("www.unicode.org").  The simplest way to let
       the browser know about this is to use the "credentials" method to let it know about a
       username and password that it can try using for that realm at that host.  The syntax is:

         $browser->credentials(
           'servername:portnumber',
           'realm-name',
          'username' => 'password'
         );

       In most cases, the port number is 80, the default TCP/IP port for HTTP; and you usually
       call the "credentials" method before you make any requests.  For example:

         $browser->credentials(
           'reports.mybazouki.com:80',
           'web_server_usage_reports',
           'plinky' => 'banjo123'
         );

       So if we add the following to the program above, right after the "$browser =
       LWP::UserAgent->new;" line...

         $browser->credentials(  # add this to our $browser 's "key ring"
           'www.unicode.org:80',
           'Unicode-MailList-Archives',
           'unicode-ml' => 'unicode'
         );

       ...then when we run it, the request succeeds, instead of causing the "die" to be called.

   Accessing HTTPS URLs
       When you access an HTTPS URL, it'll work for you just like an HTTP URL would -- if your
       LWP installation has HTTPS support (via an appropriate Secure Sockets Layer library).  For
       example:

         use LWP;
         my $url = 'https://www.paypal.com/';   # Yes, HTTPS!
         my $browser = LWP::UserAgent->new;
         my $response = $browser->get($url);
         die "Error at $url\n ", $response->status_line, "\n Aborting"
          unless $response->is_success;
         print "Whee, it worked!  I got that ",
          $response->content_type, " document!\n";

       If your LWP installation doesn't have HTTPS support set up, then the response will be
       unsuccessful, and you'll get this error message:

         Error at https://www.paypal.com/
          501 Protocol scheme 'https' is not supported
          Aborting at paypal.pl line 7.   [or whatever program and line]

       If your LWP installation does have HTTPS support installed, then the response should be
       successful, and you should be able to consult $response just like with any normal HTTP
       response.

       For information about installing HTTPS support for your LWP installation, see the helpful
       README.SSL file that comes in the libwww-perl distribution.

   Getting Large Documents
       When you're requesting a large (or at least potentially large) document, a problem with
       the normal way of using the request methods (like "$response = $browser->get($url)") is
       that the response object in memory will have to hold the whole document -- in memory. If
       the response is a thirty megabyte file, this is likely to be quite an imposition on this
       process's memory usage.

       A notable alternative is to have LWP save the content to a file on disk, instead of saving
       it up in memory.  This is the syntax to use:

         $response = $ua->get($url,
                                ':content_file' => $filespec,
                             );

       For example,

         $response = $ua->get('http://search.cpan.org/',
                                ':content_file' => '/tmp/sco.html'
                             );

       When you use this ":content_file" option, the $response will have all the normal header
       lines, but "$response->content" will be empty.

       Note that this ":content_file" option isn't supported under older versions of LWP, so you
       should consider adding "use LWP 5.66;" to check the LWP version, if you think your program
       might run on systems with older versions.

       If you need to be compatible with older LWP versions, then use this syntax, which does the
       same thing:

         use HTTP::Request::Common;
         $response = $ua->request( GET($url), $filespec );

SEE ALSO

       Remember, this article is just the most rudimentary introduction to LWP -- to learn more
       about LWP and LWP-related tasks, you really must read from the following:

       •   LWP::Simple -- simple functions for getting/heading/mirroring URLs

       •   LWP -- overview of the libwww-perl modules

       •   LWP::UserAgent -- the class for objects that represent "virtual browsers"

       •   HTTP::Response -- the class for objects that represent the response to a LWP response,
           as in "$response = $browser->get(...)"

       •   HTTP::Message and HTTP::Headers -- classes that provide more methods to
           HTTP::Response.

       •   URI -- class for objects that represent absolute or relative URLs

       •   URI::Escape -- functions for URL-escaping and URL-unescaping strings (like turning
           "this & that" to and from "this%20%26%20that").

       •   HTML::Entities -- functions for HTML-escaping and HTML-unescaping strings (like
           turning "C. & E. Brontee" to and from "C. &amp; E. Bront&euml;")

       •   HTML::TokeParser and HTML::TreeBuilder -- classes for parsing HTML

       •   HTML::LinkExtor -- class for finding links in HTML documents

       •   The book Perl & LWP by Sean M. Burke.  O'Reilly & Associates, 2002.  ISBN:
           0-596-00178-9, <http://oreilly.com/catalog/perllwp/>.  The whole book is also
           available free online: <http://lwp.interglacial.com>.

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright 2002, Sean M. Burke.  You can redistribute this document and/or modify it, but
       only under the same terms as Perl itself.

AUTHOR

       Sean M. Burke "sburke@cpan.org"