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
includes many step-by-step examples that show how to apply the various techniques. Programs to extract information from the web sites of BBC News, Altavista, ABEBooks.com, and the Weather Underground, to name just a few, are explained in detail, so that you understand how and why they work. Perl programmers who want to automate and mine the web can pick up this book and be immediately productive. Written by a contributor to LWP, and with a foreword by one of LWP's creators,
is the authoritative guide to this powerful and popular toolkit.