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LWP(3pm)                       User Contributed Perl Documentation                       LWP(3pm)

NAME
       LWP - The World-Wide Web library for Perl

SYNOPSIS
         use LWP;
         print "This is libwww-perl-$LWP::VERSION\n";

DESCRIPTION
       The libwww-perl collection is a set of Perl modules which provides a simple and consistent
       application programming interface (API) to the World-Wide Web.  The main focus of the
       library is to provide classes and functions that allow you to write WWW clients. The
       library also contain modules that are of more general use and even classes that help you
       implement simple HTTP servers.

       Most modules in this library provide an object oriented API.  The user agent, requests
       sent and responses received from the WWW server are all represented by objects.  This
       makes a simple and powerful interface to these services.  The interface is easy to extend
       and customize for your own needs.

       The main features of the library are:

       o  Contains various reusable components (modules) that can be used separately or together.

       o  Provides an object oriented model of HTTP-style communication.  Within this framework
          we currently support access to "http", "https", "gopher", "ftp", "news", "file", and
          "mailto" resources.

       o  Provides a full object oriented interface or a very simple procedural interface.

       o  Supports the basic and digest authorization schemes.

       o  Supports transparent redirect handling.

       o  Supports access through proxy servers.

       o  Provides parser for robots.txt files and a framework for constructing robots.

       o  Supports parsing of HTML forms.

       o  Implements HTTP content negotiation algorithm that can be used both in protocol modules
          and in server scripts (like CGI scripts).

       o  Supports HTTP cookies.

       o  Some simple command line clients, for instance "lwp-request" and "lwp-download".

HTTP STYLE COMMUNICATION
       The libwww-perl library is based on HTTP style communication. This section tries to
       describe what that means.

       Let us start with this quote from the HTTP specification document
       <http://www.w3.org/Protocols/>:

       o  The HTTP protocol is based on a request/response paradigm. A client establishes a
          connection with a server and sends a request to the server in the form of a request
          method, URI, and protocol version, followed by a MIME-like message containing request
          modifiers, client information, and possible body content. The server responds with a
          status line, including the message's protocol version and a success or error code,
          followed by a MIME-like message containing server information, entity meta-information,
          and possible body content.

       What this means to libwww-perl is that communication always take place through these
       steps: First a request object is created and configured. This object is then passed to a
       server and we get a response object in return that we can examine. A request is always
       independent of any previous requests, i.e. the service is stateless.  The same simple
       model is used for any kind of service we want to access.

       For example, if we want to fetch a document from a remote file server, then we send it a
       request that contains a name for that document and the response will contain the document
       itself.  If we access a search engine, then the content of the request will contain the
       query parameters and the response will contain the query result.  If we want to send a
       mail message to somebody then we send a request object which contains our message to the
       mail server and the response object will contain an acknowledgment that tells us that the
       message has been accepted and will be forwarded to the recipient(s).

       It is as simple as that!

   The Request Object
       The libwww-perl request object has the class name HTTP::Request.  The fact that the class
       name uses "HTTP::" as a prefix only implies that we use the HTTP model of communication.
       It does not limit the kind of services we can try to pass this request to.  For instance,
       we will send HTTP::Requests both to ftp and gopher servers, as well as to the local file
       system.

       The main attributes of the request objects are:

       o  method is a short string that tells what kind of request this is.  The most common
          methods are GET, PUT, POST and HEAD.

       o  uri is a string denoting the protocol, server and the name of the "document" we want to
          access.  The uri might also encode various other parameters.

       o  headers contains additional information about the request and can also used to describe
          the content.  The headers are a set of keyword/value pairs.

       o  content is an arbitrary amount of data.

   The Response Object
       The libwww-perl response object has the class name HTTP::Response.  The main attributes of
       objects of this class are:

       o  code is a numerical value that indicates the overall outcome of the request.

       o  message is a short, human readable string that corresponds to the code.

       o  headers contains additional information about the response and describe the content.

       o  content is an arbitrary amount of data.

       Since we don't want to handle all possible code values directly in our programs, a libwww-
       perl response object has methods that can be used to query what kind of response this is.
       The most commonly used response classification methods are:

       is_success()
          The request was successfully received, understood or accepted.

       is_error()
          The request failed.  The server or the resource might not be available, access to the
          resource might be denied or other things might have failed for some reason.

   The User Agent
       Let us assume that we have created a request object. What do we actually do with it in
       order to receive a response?

       The answer is that you pass it to a user agent object and this object takes care of all
       the things that need to be done (like low-level communication and error handling) and
       returns a response object. The user agent represents your application on the network and
       provides you with an interface that can accept requests and return responses.

       The user agent is an interface layer between your application code and the network.
       Through this interface you are able to access the various servers on the network.

       The class name for the user agent is LWP::UserAgent.  Every libwww-perl application that
       wants to communicate should create at least one object of this class. The main method
       provided by this object is request(). This method takes an HTTP::Request object as
       argument and (eventually) returns a HTTP::Response object.

       The user agent has many other attributes that let you configure how it will interact with
       the network and with your application.

       o  timeout specifies how much time we give remote servers to respond before the library
          disconnects and creates an internal timeout response.

       o  agent specifies the name that your application uses when it presents itself on the
          network.

       o  from can be set to the e-mail address of the person responsible for running the
          application.  If this is set, then the address will be sent to the servers with every
          request.

       o  parse_head specifies whether we should initialize response headers from the "<head>"
          section of HTML documents.

       o  proxy and no_proxy specify if and when to go through a proxy server.
          <http://www.w3.org/History/1994/WWW/Proxies/>

       o  credentials provides a way to set up user names and passwords needed to access certain
          services.

       Many applications want even more control over how they interact with the network and they
       get this by sub-classing LWP::UserAgent.  The library includes a sub-class, LWP::RobotUA,
       for robot applications.

   An Example
       This example shows how the user agent, a request and a response are represented in actual
       perl code:

         # Create a user agent object
         use LWP::UserAgent;
         my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
         $ua->agent("MyApp/0.1 ");

         # Create a request
         my $req = HTTP::Request->new(POST => 'http://search.cpan.org/search');
         $req->content_type('application/x-www-form-urlencoded');
         $req->content('query=libwww-perl&mode=dist');

         # Pass request to the user agent and get a response back
         my $res = $ua->request($req);

         # Check the outcome of the response
         if ($res->is_success) {
             print $res->content;
         }
         else {
             print $res->status_line, "\n";
         }

       The $ua is created once when the application starts up.  New request objects should
       normally created for each request sent.

NETWORK SUPPORT
       This section discusses the various protocol schemes and the HTTP style methods that
       headers may be used for each.

       For all requests, a "User-Agent" header is added and initialized from the "$ua->agent"
       attribute before the request is handed to the network layer.  In the same way, a "From"
       header is initialized from the $ua->from attribute.

       For all responses, the library adds a header called "Client-Date".  This header holds the
       time when the response was received by your application.  The format and semantics of the
       header are the same as the server created "Date" header.  You may also encounter other
       "Client-XXX" headers.  They are all generated by the library internally and are not
       received from the servers.

   HTTP Requests
       HTTP requests are just handed off to an HTTP server and it decides what happens.  Few
       servers implement methods beside the usual "GET", "HEAD", "POST" and "PUT", but CGI-
       scripts may implement any method they like.

       If the server is not available then the library will generate an internal error response.

       The library automatically adds a "Host" and a "Content-Length" header to the HTTP request
       before it is sent over the network.

       For a GET request you might want to add an "If-Modified-Since" or "If-None-Match" header
       to make the request conditional.

       For a POST request you should add the "Content-Type" header.  When you try to emulate HTML
       <FORM> handling you should usually let the value of the "Content-Type" header be
       "application/x-www-form-urlencoded".  See lwpcook for examples of this.

       The libwww-perl HTTP implementation currently support the HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/1.0 protocol.

       The library allows you to access proxy server through HTTP.  This means that you can set
       up the library to forward all types of request through the HTTP protocol module.  See
       LWP::UserAgent for documentation of this.

   HTTPS Requests
       HTTPS requests are HTTP requests over an encrypted network connection using the SSL
       protocol developed by Netscape.  Everything about HTTP requests above also apply to HTTPS
       requests.  In addition the library will add the headers "Client-SSL-Cipher", "Client-SSL-
       Cert-Subject" and "Client-SSL-Cert-Issuer" to the response.  These headers denote the
       encryption method used and the name of the server owner.

       The request can contain the header "If-SSL-Cert-Subject" in order to make the request
       conditional on the content of the server certificate.  If the certificate subject does not
       match, no request is sent to the server and an internally generated error response is
       returned.  The value of the "If-SSL-Cert-Subject" header is interpreted as a Perl regular
       expression.

   FTP Requests
       The library currently supports GET, HEAD and PUT requests.  GET retrieves a file or a
       directory listing from an FTP server.  PUT stores a file on a ftp server.

       You can specify a ftp account for servers that want this in addition to user name and
       password.  This is specified by including an "Account" header in the request.

       User name/password can be specified using basic authorization or be encoded in the URL.
       Failed logins return an UNAUTHORIZED response with "WWW-Authenticate: Basic" and can be
       treated like basic authorization for HTTP.

       The library supports ftp ASCII transfer mode by specifying the "type=a" parameter in the
       URL. It also supports transfer of ranges for FTP transfers using the "Range" header.

       Directory listings are by default returned unprocessed (as returned from the ftp server)
       with the content media type reported to be "text/ftp-dir-listing". The File::Listing
       module provides methods for parsing of these directory listing.

       The ftp module is also able to convert directory listings to HTML and this can be
       requested via the standard HTTP content negotiation mechanisms (add an "Accept: text/html"
       header in the request if you want this).

       For normal file retrievals, the "Content-Type" is guessed based on the file name suffix.
       See LWP::MediaTypes.

       The "If-Modified-Since" request header works for servers that implement the "MDTM"
       command.  It will probably not work for directory listings though.

       Example:

         $req = HTTP::Request->new(GET => 'ftp://me:passwd AT ftp.com/');
         $req->header(Accept => "text/html, */*;q=0.1");

   News Requests
       Access to the USENET News system is implemented through the NNTP protocol.  The name of
       the news server is obtained from the NNTP_SERVER environment variable and defaults to
       "news".  It is not possible to specify the hostname of the NNTP server in news: URLs.

       The library supports GET and HEAD to retrieve news articles through the NNTP protocol.
       You can also post articles to newsgroups by using (surprise!) the POST method.

       GET on newsgroups is not implemented yet.

       Examples:

         $req = HTTP::Request->new(GET => 'news:abc1234 AT a.no');

         $req = HTTP::Request->new(POST => 'news:comp.lang.perl.test');
         $req->header(Subject => 'This is a test',
                      From    => 'me AT some.org');
         $req->content(<<EOT);
         This is the content of the message that we are sending to
         the world.
         EOT

   Gopher Request
       The library supports the GET and HEAD methods for gopher requests.  All request header
       values are ignored.  HEAD cheats and returns a response without even talking to server.

       Gopher menus are always converted to HTML.

       The response "Content-Type" is generated from the document type encoded (as the first
       letter) in the request URL path itself.

       Example:

         $req = HTTP::Request->new(GET => 'gopher://gopher.sn.no/');

   File Request
       The library supports GET and HEAD methods for file requests.  The "If-Modified-Since"
       header is supported.  All other headers are ignored.  The host component of the file URL
       must be empty or set to "localhost".  Any other host value will be treated as an error.

       Directories are always converted to an HTML document.  For normal files, the "Content-
       Type" and "Content-Encoding" in the response are guessed based on the file suffix.

       Example:

         $req = HTTP::Request->new(GET => 'file:/etc/passwd');

   Mailto Request
       You can send (aka "POST") mail messages using the library.  All headers specified for the
       request are passed on to the mail system.  The "To" header is initialized from the mail
       address in the URL.

       Example:

         $req = HTTP::Request->new(POST => 'mailto:libwww AT perl.org');
         $req->header(Subject => "subscribe");
         $req->content("Please subscribe me to the libwww-perl mailing list!\n");

   CPAN Requests
       URLs with scheme "cpan:" are redirected to a suitable CPAN mirror.  If you have your own
       local mirror of CPAN you might tell LWP to use it for "cpan:" URLs by an assignment like
       this:

         $LWP::Protocol::cpan::CPAN = "file:/local/CPAN/";

       Suitable CPAN mirrors are also picked up from the configuration for the CPAN.pm, so if you
       have used that module a suitable mirror should be picked automatically.  If neither of
       these apply, then a redirect to the generic CPAN http location is issued.

       Example request to download the newest perl:

         $req = HTTP::Request->new(GET => "cpan:src/latest.tar.gz");

OVERVIEW OF CLASSES AND PACKAGES
       This table should give you a quick overview of the classes provided by the library.
       Indentation shows class inheritance.

        LWP::MemberMixin   -- Access to member variables of Perl5 classes
          LWP::UserAgent   -- WWW user agent class
            LWP::RobotUA   -- When developing a robot applications
          LWP::Protocol          -- Interface to various protocol schemes
            LWP::Protocol::http  -- http:// access
            LWP::Protocol::file  -- file:// access
            LWP::Protocol::ftp   -- ftp:// access
            ...

        LWP::Authen::Basic -- Handle 401 and 407 responses
        LWP::Authen::Digest

        HTTP::Headers      -- MIME/RFC822 style header (used by HTTP::Message)
        HTTP::Message      -- HTTP style message
          HTTP::Request    -- HTTP request
          HTTP::Response   -- HTTP response
        HTTP::Daemon       -- A HTTP server class

        WWW::RobotRules    -- Parse robots.txt files
          WWW::RobotRules::AnyDBM_File -- Persistent RobotRules

        Net::HTTP          -- Low level HTTP client

       The following modules provide various functions and definitions.

        LWP                -- This file.  Library version number and documentation.
        LWP::MediaTypes    -- MIME types configuration (text/html etc.)
        LWP::Simple        -- Simplified procedural interface for common functions
        HTTP::Status       -- HTTP status code (200 OK etc)
        HTTP::Date         -- Date parsing module for HTTP date formats
        HTTP::Negotiate    -- HTTP content negotiation calculation
        File::Listing      -- Parse directory listings
        HTML::Form         -- Processing for <form>s in HTML documents

MORE DOCUMENTATION
       All modules contain detailed information on the interfaces they provide.  The lwpcook
       manpage is the libwww-perl cookbook that contain examples of typical usage of the library.
       You might want to take a look at how the scripts lwp-request, lwp-download, lwp-dump and
       lwp-mirror are implemented.

ENVIRONMENT
       The following environment variables are used by LWP:

       HOME
           The LWP::MediaTypes functions will look for the .media.types and .mime.types files
           relative to you home directory.

       http_proxy
       ftp_proxy
       xxx_proxy
       no_proxy
           These environment variables can be set to enable communication through a proxy server.
           See the description of the "env_proxy" method in LWP::UserAgent.

       PERL_LWP_ENV_PROXY
           If set to a TRUE value, then the LWP::UserAgent will by default call "env_proxy"
           during initialization.  This makes LWP honor the proxy variables described above.

       PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME
           The default "verify_hostname" setting for LWP::UserAgent.  If not set the default will
           be 1.  Set it as 0 to disable hostname verification (the default prior to libwww-perl
           5.840.

       PERL_LWP_SSL_CA_FILE
       PERL_LWP_SSL_CA_PATH
           The file and/or directory where the trusted Certificate Authority certificates is
           located.  See LWP::UserAgent for details.

       PERL_HTTP_URI_CLASS
           Used to decide what URI objects to instantiate.  The default is URI.  You might want
           to set it to URI::URL for compatibility with old times.

AUTHORS
       LWP was made possible by contributions from Adam Newby, Albert Dvornik, Alexandre Duret-
       Lutz, Andreas Gustafsson, Andreas Konig, Andrew Pimlott, Andy Lester, Ben Coleman,
       Benjamin Low, Ben Low, Ben Tilly, Blair Zajac, Bob Dalgleish, BooK, Brad Hughes, Brian J.
       Murrell, Brian McCauley, Charles C. Fu, Charles Lane, Chris Nandor, Christian Gilmore,
       Chris W. Unger, Craig Macdonald, Dale Couch, Dan Kubb, Dave Dunkin, Dave W. Smith, David
       Coppit, David Dick, David D. Kilzer, Doug MacEachern, Edward Avis, erik, Gary Shea, Gisle
       Aas, Graham Barr, Gurusamy Sarathy, Hans de Graaff, Harald Joerg, Harry Bochner, Hugo,
       Ilya Zakharevich, INOUE Yoshinari, Ivan Panchenko, Jack Shirazi, James Tillman, Jan
       Dubois, Jared Rhine, Jim Stern, Joao Lopes, John Klar, Johnny Lee, Josh Kronengold, Josh
       Rai, Joshua Chamas, Joshua Hoblitt, Kartik Subbarao, Keiichiro Nagano, Ken Williams,
       KONISHI Katsuhiro, Lee T Lindley, Liam Quinn, Marc Hedlund, Marc Langheinrich, Mark D.
       Anderson, Marko Asplund, Mark Stosberg, Markus B Kruger, Markus Laker, Martijn Koster,
       Martin Thurn, Matthew Eldridge, Matthew.van.Eerde, Matt Sergeant, Michael A. Chase,
       Michael Quaranta, Michael Thompson, Mike Schilli, Moshe Kaminsky, Nathan Torkington,
       Nicolai Langfeldt, Norton Allen, Olly Betts, Paul J. Schinder, peterm, Philip Guenther,
       Daniel Buenzli, Pon Hwa Lin, Radoslaw Zielinski, Radu Greab, Randal L. Schwartz, Richard
       Chen, Robin Barker, Roy Fielding, Sander van Zoest, Sean M. Burke, shildreth, Slaven
       Rezic, Steve A Fink, Steve Hay, Steven Butler, Steve_Kilbane, Takanori Ugai, Thomas
       Lotterer, Tim Bunce, Tom Hughes, Tony Finch, Ville Skytta, Ward Vandewege, William York,
       Yale Huang, and Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes.

       LWP owes a lot in motivation, design, and code, to the libwww-perl library for Perl4 by
       Roy Fielding, which included work from Alberto Accomazzi, James Casey, Brooks Cutter,
       Martijn Koster, Oscar Nierstrasz, Mel Melchner, Gertjan van Oosten, Jared Rhine, Jack
       Shirazi, Gene Spafford, Marc VanHeyningen, Steven E. Brenner, Marion Hakanson, Waldemar
       Kebsch, Tony Sanders, and Larry Wall; see the libwww-perl-0.40 library for details.

COPYRIGHT
         Copyright 1995-2009, Gisle Aas
         Copyright 1995, Martijn Koster

       This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same
       terms as Perl itself.

AVAILABILITY
       The latest version of this library is likely to be available from CPAN as well as:

         http://github.com/libwww-perl/libwww-perl

       The best place to discuss this code is on the <libwww AT perl.org> mailing list.

perl v5.32.1                                2022-01-28                                   LWP(3pm)

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