WWW::Mechanize::Cookbook(3)

NAME
WWW::Mechanize::Cookbook - 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();

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 );

APPLICATIONS

  Check all pages on a web site
Use Abe Timmerman's WWW::CheckSite <http://search.cpan.org/dist/WWW-CheckSite/>

AUTHORS
Copyright 2005 Andy Lester "<andy@petdance.com>"

Later contributions by Peter Scott, Mark Stosberg and others.