How can I use Perl to send and HTTP request with a cookie?

Question

I am new to Perl and I want to write a Perl program that:

• creates an HTTP request
• sends it to any URL (e.g. http://www.google.com )
• includes

Answer 1

Start with LWP::UserAgent and HTTP::Cookies

Answer 2

As mentioned cookies are in HTTP::Cookies:

• You need to create a cookie jar

• You set the value of the cookies to put in the jar

• You then associate that jar with your user agent

For example:

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
my $cookies = HTTP::Cookies->new();
$cookies->set_cookie(0,'cookiename', 'value','/','google.com',80,0,0,86400,0);
$ua->cookie_jar($cookies);
# Now make your request

set_cookie has a rather large number of arguments:

set_cookie( $version, $key, $val, $path, $domain, $port, $path_spec, $secure, $maxage, $discard, \%rest )

This is because the cookie jar is designed from the point of view of a browser (a UserAgent), rather than a single request. This means not all the arguments are so important in this case.

The ones you need to get right are $key, $val, $path, $domain, $port.

Regarding the:

500 Can't connect to www.google.com:80 (Bad hostname 'www.google.com')

It means that LWP can't lookup the address for Google. Are you behind a web proxy? If so you will need to set your proxy in the UA too using something like:

$ua->proxy(['http', 'https'], 'http://proxyhost.my.domain.com:8080/');