/ 
WWW-Mechanize-2.18
River stage three • 282 direct dependents • 550 total dependents
/ WWW::Mechanize::Cookbook

NAME

WWW::Mechanize::Cookbook - Recipes for using WWW::Mechanize

VERSION

version 2.18

INTRODUCTION

First, please note that many of these are possible just using LWP::UserAgent. Since WWW::Mechanize is a subclass of LWP::UserAgent, whatever works on LWP::UserAgent should work on WWW::Mechanize. See the lwpcook man page included with LWP.

BASICS

Launch the WWW::Mechanize browser

use WWW::Mechanize;

my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new( autocheck => 1 );

The autocheck => 1 tells Mechanize to die if any IO fails, so you don't have to manually check. It's easier that way. If you want to do your own error checking, leave it out.

Fetch a page

$mech->get( "http://search.cpan.org" );
print $mech->content;

$mech->content contains the raw HTML from the web page. It is not parsed or handled in any way, at least through the content method.

Fetch a page into a file

Sometimes you want to dump your results directly into a file. For example, there's no reason to read a JPEG into memory if you're only going to write it out immediately. This can also help with memory issues on large files.

$mech->get( "http://www.cpan.org/src/stable.tar.gz",
            ":content_file" => "stable.tar.gz" );

Fetch a password-protected page

Generally, just call credentials before fetching the page.

$mech->credentials( 'admin' => 'password' );
$mech->get( 'http://10.11.12.13/password.html' );
print $mech->content();

LINKS

Find all links that point to a JPEG, GIF or PNG.

my @links = $mech->find_all_links(
    tag => "a", url_regex => qr/\.(jpe?g|gif|png)$/i );

Find all links that have the word "download" in them.

my @links = $mech->find_all_links(
    tag => "a", text_regex => qr/\bdownload\b/i );

ADVANCED

See what will be sent without actually sending anything

$mech->add_handler("request_send", sub { shift->dump; exit; });
$mech->get("http://www.example.com");

SEE ALSO

WWW::Mechanize

AUTHOR

Andy Lester <andy at petdance.com>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This software is copyright (c) 2004 by Andy Lester.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.