Perl & LWP

Perl soared to popularity as a language for creating and managing web content, but with LWP (Library for WWW in Perl), Perl is equally adept at consuming information on the Web. LWP is a suite of modules for fetching and processing web pages. The Web is a vast data source that contains everything from stock prices to movie credits, and with LWP all that data is just a few lines of code away. Anything you do on the Web, whether it's buying or selling, reading or writing, uploading or downloading, news to e-commerce, can be controlled with Perl and LWP. You can automate Web-base.

Includes index.

Table of Contents; Foreword; Preface; Audience for This Book; Structure of This Book; Order of Chapters; Important Standards Documents; Conventions Used in This Book; Comments & Questions; Acknowledgments; Introduction to Web Automation; The Web as Data Source; Screen Scraping; Brittleness; Web Services; History of LWP; Installing LWP; Installing LWP from the CPAN Shell; Configuring; Obtaining help; Installing LWP; Installing LWP Manually; Download distributions; Unpack and configure; Make, test, and install; Words of Caution; Network and Server Load; Copyright; Acceptable Use; LWP in Action

The Object-Oriented InterfaceForms; Parsing HTML; Authentication; Web Basics; URLs; An HTTP Transaction; Request; Response; LWP::Simple; Basic Document Fetch; Fetch and Store; Fetch and Print; Previewing with HEAD; Fetching Documents Without LWP::Simple; Example: AltaVista; HTTP POST; Example: Babelfish; The LWP Class Model; The Basic Classes; Programming with LWP Classes; Inside the do_GET and do_POST Functions; User Agents; Connection Parameters; Request Parameters; Protocols; Redirection; Authentication; Proxies; Request Methods; Saving response content to a file

Sending response content …