Question

In a Perl script (with Ubuntu) I’d like to do something like

    use Blah;
    ...
    ...
    my $response = 
       &Blah::Fetch($URL, {'method'=>'POST', 'parameters' => \%params});

which I’ve written for convenience to look a lot like a Prototype.js ajax call, but obviously we’re using Perl not Javascript, we’re on a server not a browser, and the caller wants to block until we get an answer or timeout back from the remote server. In case of a server or timeout error, defined($response) should be false. If there’s a way to fetch HTTP status that’s nice, but it is enough to know the request failed. It should be able to do either GET or POST.

I know I can do this by using system and wget, but that’s a kludge.

What is the best way to do this task in Perl?

Is there a Perl interface that is nice and tidy?

Answer 1

You can use HTTP::Request

use HTTP::Request::Common qw(POST); 
use LWP::UserAgent; 

$ua = LWP::UserAgent->new; 
$ua->timeout(3); 

my $req = (POST 'http://stackoverflow.com',  
["param1" => $var1, 
"param2" => $var2]); 

$response = $ua->request($req); 
$content = $response->content; 

exit;

For response elements, see more here: http://kobesearch.cpan.org/htdocs/libwww-perl/HTTP/Request.html