WWW::Mechanize::Cookbook(3)

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 image 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 download links
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.