LWP::UserAgent - A WWW UserAgent class
SYNOPSIS
require LWP::UserAgent;
$ua = new LWP::UserAgent;
$request = new HTTP::Request('GET', 'file://localhost/etc/motd');
$response = $ua->request($request); # or
$response = $ua->request($request, '/tmp/sss'); # or
$response = $ua->request($request, \&callback, 4096);
sub callback { my($data, $response, $protocol) = @_; .... }
DESCRIPTION
The LWP::UserAgent is a class implementing a simple World-
Wide Web user agent in Perl. It brings together the
HTTP::Request, HTTP::Response and the LWP::Protocol
classes that form the rest of the core of libwww-perl
library. For simple uses this class can be used directly
to dispatch WWW requests, alternatively it can be
subclassed for application-specific behaviour.
In normal usage the application creates a UserAgent
object, and then configures it with values for timeouts
proxies, name, etc. The next step is to create an instance
of HTTP::Request for the request that needs to be
performed. This request is then passed to the UserAgent
request() method, which dispatches it using the relevant
protocol, and returns a HTTP::Response object.
The basic approach of the library is to use HTTP style
communication for all protocol schemes, i.e. you will
receive an HTTP::Response object also for gopher or ftp
requests. In order to achieve even more similarities with
HTTP style communications, gopher menus and file
directories will be converted to HTML documents.
The request() method can process the content of the
response in one of three ways: in core, into a file, or
into repeated calls of a subroutine. You choose which one
by the kind of value passed as the second argument to
request().
The in core variant simply returns the content in a scalar
attribute called content() of the response object, and is
suitable for small HTML replies that might need further
parsing. This variant is used if the second argument is
missing (or is undef).
The filename variant requires a scalar containing a
directly to the file, without requiring large amounts of
memory. In this case the response object returned from
request() will have empty content(). If the request
fails, then the content() might not be empty, and the file
will be untouched.
The subroutine variant requires a reference to callback
routine as the second argument to request() and it can
also take an optional chuck size as third argument. This
variant can be used to construct "pipe-lined" processing,
where processing of received chuncks can begin before the
complete data has arrived. The callback function is
called with 3 arguments: the data received this time, a
reference to the response object and a reference to the
protocol object. The response object returned from
request() will have empty content(). If the request
fails, then the the callback routine will not have been
called, and the response->content() might not be empty.
The request can be aborted by calling die() within the
callback routine. The die message will be available as
the "X-Died" special response header field.
The library also accepts that you put a subroutine
reference as content in the request object. This
subroutine should return the content (possibly in pieces)
when called. It should return an empty string when there
is no more content.
The user of this module can finetune timeouts and error
handling by calling the use_alarm() and use_eval()
methods.
By default the library uses alarm() to implement timeouts,
dying if the timeout occurs. If this is not the prefered
behaviour or it interferes with other parts of the
application one can disable the use alarms. When alarms
are disabled timeouts can still occur for example when
reading data, but other cases like name lookups etc will
not be timed out by the library itself.
The library catches errors (such as internal errors and
timeouts) and present them as HTTP error responses.
Alternatively one can switch off this behaviour, and let
the application handle dies.
METHODS
The following methods are available:
$ua = new LWP::UserAgent;
Constructor for the UserAgent. Returns a reference to
a LWP::UserAgent object.
This method dispatches a single WWW request on behalf
of a user, and returns the response received. The
$request should be a reference to a HTTP::Request
object with values defined for at least the method()
and url() attributes.
If $arg is a scalar it is taken as a filename where
the content of the response is stored.
If $arg is a reference to a subroutine, then this
routine is called as chunks of the content is
received. An optional $size argument is taken as a
hint for an appropriate chunk size.
If $arg is omitted, then the content is stored in the
response object itself.
$ua->request($request, $arg [, $size])
Process a request, including redirects and security.
This method may actually send several different simple
reqeusts.
The arguments are the same as for simple_request().
$ua->redirect_ok
This method is called by request() before it tries to
do any redirects. It should return a true value if
the redirect is allowed to be performed. Subclasses
might want to override this.
The default implementation will return FALSE for POST
request and TRUE for all others.
$ua->credentials($netloc, $realm, $uname, $pass)
Set the user name and password to be used for a realm.
It is often more useful to specialize the
get_basic_credentials() method instead.
$ua->get_basic_credentials($realm, $uri, [$proxy])
This is called by request() to retrieve credentials
for a Realm protected by Basic Authentication or
Digest Authentication.
Should return username and password in a list. Return
undef to abort the authentication resolution atempts.
This implementation simply checks a set of pre-stored
member variables. Subclasses can override this method
to e.g. ask the user for a username/password. An
example of this can be found in lwp-request program
distributed with this library.
Get/set the product token that is used to identify the
user agent on the network. The agent value is sent as
the "User-Agent" header in the requests. The default
agent name is "libwww-perl/#.##", where "#.##" is
substitued with the version numer of this library.
The user agent string should be one or more simple
product identifiers with an optional version number
separated by the "/" character. Examples are:
$ua->agent('Checkbot/0.4 ' . $ua->agent);
$ua->agent('Mozilla/5.0');
$ua->from([$email_address])
Get/set the Internet e-mail address for the human user
who controls the requesting user agent. The address
should be machine-usable, as defined in RFC 822. The
from value is send as the "From" header in the
requests. There is no default. Example:
$ua->from('aas@sn.no');
$ua->timeout([$secs])
Get/set the timeout value in seconds. The default
timeout() value is 180 seconds, i.e. 3 minutes.
$ua->cookie_jar([$cookies])
Get/set the HTTP::Cookies object to use. The default
is to have no cookie_jar, i.e. never automatically add
"Cookie" headers to the requests.
$ua->use_alarm([$boolean])
Get/set a value indicating wether to use alarm() when
implementing timeouts. The default is TRUE, if your
system supports it. You can disable it if it
interfers with other uses of alarm in your
application.
$ua->use_eval([$boolean])
Get/set a value indicating wether to handle internal
errors internally by trapping with eval. The default
is TRUE, i.e. the $ua->request() will never die.
$ua->parse_head([$boolean])
Get/set a value indicating wether we should initialize
response headers from the <head> section of HTML
documents. The default is TRUE. Do not turn this off,
unless you know what you are doing.
$ua->max_size([$bytes])
If the returned response content is only partial,
because the size limit was exceeded, then a
"X-Content-Range" header will be added to the
response.
$ua->clone;
Returns a copy of the LWP::UserAgent object
$ua->is_protocol_supported($scheme)
You can use this method to query if the library
currently support the specified scheme. The scheme
might be a string (like 'http' or 'ftp') or it might
be an URI::URL object reference.
$ua->mirror($url, $file)
Get and store a document identified by a URL, using
If-Modified-Since, and checking of the Content-Length.
Returns a reference to the response object.
$ua->proxy(...)
Set/retrieve proxy URL for a scheme:
$ua->proxy(['http', 'ftp'], 'http://proxy.sn.no:8001/');
$ua->proxy('gopher', 'http://proxy.sn.no:8001/');
The first form specifies that the URL is to be used
for proxying of access methods listed in the list in
the first method argument, i.e. 'http' and 'ftp'.
The second form shows a shorthand form for specifying
proxy URL for a single access scheme.
$ua->env_proxy()
Load proxy settings from *_proxy environment
variables. You might specify proxies like this (sh-
syntax):
gopher_proxy=http://proxy.my.place/
wais_proxy=http://proxy.my.place/
no_proxy="my.place"
export gopher_proxy wais_proxy no_proxy
Csh or tcsh users should use the setenv command to
define these envirionment variables.
$ua->no_proxy($domain,...)
Do not proxy requests to the given domains. Calling
no_proxy without any domains clears the list of
domains. Eg:
$ua->no_proxy('localhost', 'no', ...);
See the LWP manpage for a complete overview of libwww-
perl5. See lwp-request and lwp-mirror for examples of
usage.
COPYRIGHT
Copyright 1995-1997 Gisle Aas.
This library is free software; you can redistribute it
and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.