[Memphis.pm] Submitting Form Data

[Brock Sides]

Matt Bledsoe wrote:
> 
> I'm trying to make a perl script that will submit data to a cgi as if I had
> clicked a button on the web site to do the same.  It's got me stumped and
> those two linux journal pages didn't help me much either.  Any ideas?
> 
> Matt

You need the libwww bundle.

http://www.cpan.org/modules/by-module/Bundle/libwww-perl-5.47.tar.gz

Then you do something like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use LWP::UserAgent;
use HTTP::Request;
use HTTP::Response;

# The content of the POST or GET
my $content='var1=foo&var2=baz&var3=quux';

my $ua = new LWP::UserAgent;

my $request = new HTTP::Request 'POST',
'http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/foo.cgi';
$request->header('Content-type' => 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded');
$request->header('Content-length' => length($content) );
$request->add_content($content);

# Or if you're doing a GET:

# my $request = new HTTP::Request 'GET',
"http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/foo.cgi&$content";

my $response = $ua->request($request);

__END__

Then you've got the content returned by the cgi in $response.

If you want to get really fancy, pick up the O'Reilly Pelican book, "Web
Client Programming in Perl".

libwww also includes GET, HEAD, and POST, which are free standing perl
scripts installed into /usr/bin, and which let you knock out quick shell
scripts, or do grab web content from the command line. I couldn't do
without them.

> BTW exactly how many people are on this list?  I haven't seen much happening
> on it =)

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Brock Sides
bsides at towery.com
philarete at mindspring.com
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