Question

I have the following code:

$mech->get($someurl, ":content_file" => "$i.flv");

So I’m getting the contents of a url and saving it as an flv file. I’d like to print out every second or so how much of the download is remaining. Is there any way to accomplish this in WWW::Mechanize?

Answer 1

Many thanks to Peter Kovacs’ answer for leading me to the correct answer. It turned out to be a bit more elaborate than I’d expected though so I decided to (horror) answer my own question.

As Peter showed, I can set a callback like so:

$m->get($u, ":content_cb" => \&callback);

But now I can’t save the content using the :content_file value, because I can only choose one of the two. The callback function gets passed the data, and I ended up writing that to a file instead.

I also get a response object which contains the total size of the content as friedo pointed out. So by keeping a running total of content received so far and dividing it by the total content I can find out what percent of the content has been downloaded. Here’s the full callback function:

open (VID,">$i.flv") or die "$!";
$total = 0;
sub callback
{
    my( $data, $response, $proto ) = @_;
    print VID "$data"; # write data to file
    $total+= length($data);
    $size = $response->header('Content-Length');
    print floor(($total/$size)*100),"% downloaded\n"; # print percent downloaded
}

I hope that helps someone.