WWW::Mechanize::Cookbook - Recipes for using WWW::Mechanize

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.

    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.

    $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.

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" );

Generally, just call credentials before fetching the page.

    $mech->credentials( 'admin' => 'password' );
    $mech->get( 'http://10.11.12.13/password.html' );
    print $mech->content();

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 links that have the word "download" in them.

    my @links = $mech->find_all_links(
        tag => "a", text_regex => qr/\bdownload\b/i );

Use Abe Timmerman's WWW::CheckSite http://search.cpan.org/dist/WWW-CheckSite/

WWW::Mechanize

Copyright 2005-2010 Andy Lester <andy@petdance.com>

Later contributions by Peter Scott, Mark Stosberg and others. See Acknowledgements section in WWW::Mechanize for more.