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Overview
Perl soared to popularity as a language for creating and managing web content, but with LWP (Library for WWW in Perl), Perl is equally adept at consuming information on the Web. LWP is a suite of modules for fetching and processing web pages.
The Web is a vast data source that contains everything from stock prices to movie credits, and with LWP all that data is just a few lines of code away. Anything you do on the Web, whether it's buying or selling, reading or writing, uploading or downloading, news to e-commerce, can be controlled with Perl and LWP. You can automate Web-based purchase orders as easily as you can set up a program to download MP3 files from a web site.
Perl & LWP covers:
- Understanding LWP and its design
- Fetching and analyzing URLs
- Extracting information from HTML using regular expressions and tokens
- Working with the structure of HTML documents using trees
- Setting and inspecting HTTP headers and response codes
- Managing cookies
- Accessing information that requires authentication
- Extracting links
- Cooperating with proxy caches
- Writing web spiders (also known as robots) in a safe fashion
This comprehensive guide to LWP and its applications comes with many practical examples. Topics include fetching Web pages, submitting forms, using various techniques for HTML parsing, handling cookies and authentication.