Question

I’m playing around with the Win32::IE::Mechanize. I’m trying a script to automatically access six of my web-based email accounts. The script basically works but perl throws a kind of cryptic “Can’t locate object method “warn” via package “sssself” (perhaps you forgot to load ” sssself)” error. Despite the error, the script can still get the job done. But I want to get rid of it and understand why it is happening. The following is the script. Please kindly commment where I can improve the code. Thanks like always.

use strict;
use Win32::IE::Mechanize;


my @accounts = (
'http://mail.21cn.com',
'frmmail1',
    {
        'Username' => 'myusername',
        'passwd' => 'mypassword',
        },
'http://mail.126.com',
'form',
    {
        'user' => 'myusername',
        'password' => 'mypassword',
        },
......
......
......
    );

sub arg{
shift (@accounts);
}

while(@accounts){
my $mech = Win32::IE::Mechanize->new(visible=>1);
my $url = arg;
my $form = arg;
my $account = arg;

$mech->get($url);
$mech->form_name($form);
eval {$mech->set_fields(%$account);}; 
warn $@ if $@;
$mech->click();
}

I know something is wrong with the line

$mech->set_fields(%$account);

But how can I correct it? or should I just delete

warn $@ if $@;

and pretend there’s nothing wrong?

Any comments are welcome 🙂

UPDATE

Thank you, @daotoad, for cleaning up of my ugly code 🙂 I think the nested structure is much more maintainable and nice on the eyes.

and thank you, @Eric, for pointing me to a better version of the module in question 🙂

Well, the thing is when Win32::IE:Mechanize 0.009 gives the following cryptic error message

Can’t locate object method “warn” via
package “sssself” (perhaps you forgot
to l oad “sssself”?) at
C:/Perl/site/lib/Win32/IE/Mechanize.pm
line 971.

the 0.009_17 Dev Release gives me some very very meaningful message:

No inputcontrol by the name ‘Username’
at E:\mailme.pl line 33

With this error message in mind, I checked the source file of the login page and it has turned out that the field id should be “UserName”, instead of “Username”.

So I fixed my problem 🙂
Thank you guys!

Answer 1

It appears that there is an error in Win32::IE::Mechanize version 0.009. There is a developer release 0.009_17 that may work better. I haven’t tested it, but at least the ‘sssself’ is fixed. If IE isn’t a requirement, there is also WWW::Mechanize::Firefox and WWW::Mechanize if the browser isn’t needed.