Question

I am having some difficulties getting results from a form via Perl. I believe I have successfully found the form and submitted the value I want to the appropriate field, but am unsure of how to turn the response object into something useful (If I print it out it shows up as the following).


HTTP::Request=HASH(0x895b8ac)


Here is the relevant code (assume $url is correct)

    my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
    my $responce = $ua->get($url);
    my @form = HTML::Form->parse($responce);
    my $chosen = $form[0];
    $chosen->value('netid', $user);
    my $ro = $chosen->click('Search');

What can I do to make $ro useful?

Thanks!

Answer 1

To quote the HTML::Form docs on click:

The result of clicking is an HTTP::Request object that can then be passed to LWP::UserAgent if you want to obtain the server response.

So you can do:

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
my $response = $ua->get($url);
my @form = HTML::Form->parse($response);
my $chosen = $form[0];
$chosen->value('netid', $user);
my $ro = $chosen->click('Search');

# If you want to see what you're sending to the server:
print $ro->as_string;

# Fetch the server's response:
$response = $ua->request($ro);

What you do with $response next depends on what you’re trying to do.

P.S. “responce” is usually spelled without a C. But HTTP does have a history of misspellings. (I’m looking at you, “Referer”.)