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libwww-perl (5.805)

libwww-perl is one of those venerable CPAN distributions that has been around for years and for which there is simply no alternative. It makes writing www-clients very easy and offers a decent interface. Furthermore, switching to SSL-encrypted HTTPS will require very little or not changes at all to your code-base.

It has however quite a few flaws and makes in parts arbitrary assumptions that are difficult to get by.

We use it extensively at work where we are using HTTP as a sort-of RPC. We do stretch things a little but we are certainly still within the specifications of HTTP. We were therefore surprised and rather disappointed to see how many bugs this (supposedly) mature module has: It limits the amount of header-fields to 128. The interface does not allow to increase this value so we had to redefine bits of HTTP::Methods in a very ugly way. The part that reads the HTTP response-header from the network is buggy. LWP is doing the right thing for the body interestingly enough. Again, we had to redefine one of libwww's method to work around this. Finally, HTTP::Message::parse() is broken in that it does not understand header-fields with multiple values. This is bizarre because a request with multi-valued headers (via push_header()) is correctly stringified into an HTTP request.

By and large, our impression is that libwww-perl works well for most of the common cases. Stretch it a little, though, and you'll soon find it to be a less agreeable companion.

Tassilo v. Parseval - 2006-11-11 01:41:23
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libwww-perl (5.803)

The main reason I stick to perl :-)
Excellent package - designed for rapid development of simple scripts yet still offers many advanced features for non standard projects.

Very reliable and well documented.

Eyal Udassin - 2005-05-06 11:29:06
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libwww-perl (5.803)

Excellent modules! It helps dealing with the myriad of protocols of the web very well. A must for anyone who considers doing web automation and processing from Perl.

Shlomi Fish - 2005-03-26 02:13:13
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libwww-perl (5.800)

Works great for most applications but I can't seem to get redirects to work properly. Is this a known bug?

Dan Kramer - 2004-09-27 10:18:49
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libwww-perl (5.800)

This is great, and the lwp-download is fast

manuel - 2004-08-24 17:53:13
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libwww-perl (5.79)

As said in other posts, an essential part of working with Perl on the Web.

Courtland Yockey - 2004-05-30 06:51:16
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libwww-perl (5.79)

It just rocks.

nash - 2004-04-20 06:36:25
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libwww-perl (5.76)

Huh?

Didn't get the chance to test it...
Make says:
C:\download\perl-stuff\libwww-perl-5.76>make
make: *** No rule to make target `C:\Perl\lib^', needed by `makefile'. Stop.

Per Nestande - 2004-04-05 04:40:29
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libwww-perl (5.69)

A great distribution. It's there when you need it. Which is often.

Chris Nandor - 2003-08-25 22:02:36
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LWP / libwww-perl (5.69)

A top-notch module. I wouldn't go anywhere without it. If you do any web programming in perl, this module is indispensable.

Adam J. Foxson - 2003-08-15 07:45:03
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libwww-perl (5.69)

What can I say? It's a classic.

Chip Salzenberg - 2003-08-15 07:41:49
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