comment on

I beseech the monks for wisdom and insight. I'm trying to learn how to use WWW::Mechanize to submit data to a form, but I'm clearly doing something wrong and try as I might I just can't seem to find the error. As a test case I'm using our beloved http://search.cpan.org and searching for 'mechanize'. Here's the code:

use strict;
use warnings;

use WWW::Mechanize;
use HTTP::Cookies;
use Data::Dumper;

my $url = 'http://search.cpan.org';
my $searchstring = 'mechanize';

my $mech_obj = WWW::Mechanize->new();

$mech_obj->get( $url );

if( not $mech_obj->success() )
{
    print "Could not retrieve page:\n";
    print $mech_obj->content();
    die;
}

print "all forms:\n", Dumper( [ $mech_obj->forms ] );

$mech_obj->form_number( 1 );
$mech_obj->field( 'query' => $searchstring );

print "current form:\n", Dumper( $mech_obj->current_form() );

$mech_obj->submit();

print "content:\n", $mech_obj->content();
[download]

And here is the output:

all forms:
$VAR1 = [
          bless( {
                   'inputs' => [
                                 bless( {
                                          'value' => '',
                                          'size' => '35',
                                          'type' => 'text',
                                          'name' => 'query'
                                        }, 'HTML::Form::TextInput' ),
                                 bless( {
                                          'seen' => [
                                                      1,
                                                      0,
                                                      0,
                                                      0
                                                    ],
                                          'menu' => [
                                                      'all',
                                                      'module',
                                                      'dist',
                                                      'author'
                                                    ],
                                          'current' => 0,
                                          'type' => 'option',
                                          'name' => 'mode'
                                        }, 'HTML::Form::ListInput' ),
                                 bless( {
                                          'value' => 'CPAN Search',
                                          'type' => 'submit'
                                        }, 'HTML::Form::SubmitInput' )
                               ],
                   'extra_attr' => {
                                     'class' => 'searchbox',
                                     'name' => 'f'
                                   },
                   'enctype' => 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded',
                   'method' => 'GET',
                   'action' => bless( do{\(my $o = 'http://search.cpan
+.org/search')}, 'URI::http' )
                 }, 'HTML::Form' )
        ];
current form:
$VAR1 = bless( {
                 'inputs' => [
                               bless( {
                                        'value' => 'mechanize',
                                        'size' => '35',
                                        'type' => 'text',
                                        'name' => 'query'
                                      }, 'HTML::Form::TextInput' ),
                               bless( {
                                        'seen' => [
                                                    1,
                                                    0,
                                                    0,
                                                    0
                                                  ],
                                        'menu' => [
                                                    'all',
                                                    'module',
                                                    'dist',
                                                    'author'
                                                  ],
                                        'current' => 0,
                                        'type' => 'option',
                                        'name' => 'mode'
                                      }, 'HTML::Form::ListInput' ),
                               bless( {
                                        'value' => 'CPAN Search',
                                        'type' => 'submit'
                                      }, 'HTML::Form::SubmitInput' )
                             ],
                 'extra_attr' => {
                                   'class' => 'searchbox',
                                   'name' => 'f'
                                 },
                 'enctype' => 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded',
                 'method' => 'GET',
                 'action' => bless( do{\(my $o = 'http://search.cpan.o
+rg/search')}, 'URI::http' )
               }, 'HTML::Form' );
Unexpected field value http://search.cpan.org at (eval 5) line 1
[download]

Based on the output I know the proper form was selected and the query string was assigned to the proper field. I don't understand why I get an "Unexpected field value" error when the form is submitted, but I know there has to be a simple explanation for this.

Could someone please run my code and see if it works on a different system? That would at least tell me if the problem is in my code or if it is something else (e.g., the WWW::Mech installation, etc).

Thanks in advance!

In reply to "Unexpected field value" error with WWW::Mechanize by bobf

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