NAME

WWW::CIA::Source::Web - an interface to the online CIA World Factbook

SYNOPSIS

use WWW::CIA::Source::Web;
my $source = WWW::CIA::Source::DBM->new();

DESCRIPTION

WWW::CIA::Source::Web is an interface to the live, online version of the CIA World Factbook.

It's a very slow way of doing things, but requires no pre-compiled DBM. It's more likely to be useful for proving concepts or testing.

METHODS

Apart from new, these methods are normally accessed via a WWW::CIA object.

new()

This method creates a new WWW::CIA::Source::Web object. It takes no arguments.

value($country_code, $field)

Retrieve a value from the web.

$country_code should be the FIPS 10-4 country code as defined in http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/appendix/appendix-d.html.

$field should be the name of the field whose value you want to retrieve, as defined in http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/docs/notesanddefs.html. (WWW::CIA::Parser also creates four extra fields: "URL", "URL - Print", "URL - Flag", and "URL - Map" which are the URLs of the country's Factbook page, the printable version of that page, a GIF map of the country, and a GIF flag of the country respectively.)

value will return undef if the country or field cannot be found, or if there is an error GETing the page. This isn't ideal, but I can't think of the best way around it right now.

all($country_code)

Returns a hashref of field-value pairs for $country_code or an empty hashref if $country_code isn't available from the Factbook.

CACHING

In order to make some small improvement in efficiency, WWW::CIA::Source::Web keeps a copy of the data for the last country downloaded in memory.

TO DO

File system based caching of pages.

User-definable stack of cached countries, rather than just one.

Caching of last-modified headers; conditional GET.

AUTHOR

Ian Malpass (ian@indecorous.com)

COPYRIGHT

Copyright 2003, Ian Malpass

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

The CIA World Factbook's copyright information page (http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/docs/contributor_copyright.html) states:

The Factbook is in the public domain. Accordingly, it may be copied
freely without permission of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

SEE ALSO

WWW::CIA, WWW::CIA::Parser, WWW::CIA::Source::DBM