How do I download a file with WWW::Mechanize after it submits a form?

Question

I have the code:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use WWW::Mechanize;

my $url = 'http://divxsubtitles.net/page_subtitleinformation.php?ID=111292';
my $m = WWW::Mechanize->new(autocheck => 1);
$m->get($url);
$m->form_number(2);
$m->click();
my $response = $m->res();
print $m->response->headers->as_string;

It submits the download button on the page, but I'm not sure how to download the file which is sent back after the POST.

I'm wanting a way to download this with wget if possible. I was thinking that their may be a secret url passed or something? Or will I have to download it with LWP directly from the response stream?

So how do I download the file that is in that header?

Thanks,

Cody Goodman

Answer 1

After submitting the form, you can use:

$mech->save_content( $filename )

Dumps the contents of $mech->content into $filename. $filename will be overwritten. Dies if there are any errors.

If the content type does not begin with "text/", then the content is saved in binary mode.

Source: http://metacpan.org/pod/WWW::Mechanize

Answer 2

I tried your code and it returns a stack of HTML of which the only http:// references were:

    http://www.w3c.org
    http://ad.z5x.net
    http://divxsubtitles.net
    http://feeds2read.net
    http://ad.z5x.net
    http://www.google-analytics.com
    http://cls.assoc-amazon.com

using the code

    my $content = $m->response->content();
    while ( $content =~ m{(http://[^/\" \t\n\r]+)}g ) {
        print( "$1\n" );
    }

So my comments to you are:
1. add use strict; to your code, you are programming for failure if you don't
2. read the output HTML and determine what to do next, you haven't done that, and therefore you've asked an incomplete question. Unless you identify the URL you want to download you are asking somebody else to write a program for you.

Once you've identified the URL you want to download it is a simple matter of getting it and then writing the response content to a file. e.g.

if ( ! open( FOUT, ">output.bin" ) ) {
    die( "Could not create file: $!" );
}
binmode( FOUT ); # required for Windows
print( FOUT $m->response->content() );
close( FOUT );

Answer 3

Well the thing that threw me off the most was the "mechanize->form_number" subroutine starts at 1 whereas typical programs start their index at 0. If anyone wants to know how to download response headers, or download header attachments, this is the way to do it.

Now here's the full code to do what I wanted.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use WWW::Mechanize;

my $url = 'http://divxsubtitles.net/page_subtitleinformation.php?ID=111292';
my $m = WWW::Mechanize->new(autocheck => 1);
$m->get($url);
$m->form_number(2);
$m->click();
my $response = $m->res();
my $filename = $response->filename;

if (! open ( FOUT, ">$filename" ) ) {
    die("Could not create file: $!" );
}
print( FOUT $m->response->content() );
close( FOUT );