man WWW::Mechanize::Cookbook (3): Recipes for using WWW::Mechanize

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 the libwww-perl distribution.

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();

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 );

APPLICATIONS

Check all pages on a web site

Use Abe Timmerman's WWW::CheckSite <http://search.cpan.org/dist/WWW-CheckSite/>

AUTHORS

Later contributions by Peter Scott, Mark Stosberg and others. See Acknowledgements section in WWW::Mechanize for more.