I wrote html/Javascript code a few years back to scrape financial data for the company I work for on Yahoo from inside the corporate firewall. It worked well. I didn't think it was pretty but did not know how to use code to access the page directly.

Now I want to re-write it using Perl, but from what sample code I could gather from the net, it always timed out. I figured it must be the firewall because if I replaced the url with a site internal to the firewall, the code works fine.

My question is....the page can be accessed from a browser (IE, Firefox, Chrome) which is using http protocol to bring the page in, so why can't Perl code do the same? I assume that Perl's library is also using the same protocol to do the work. How could the firewall distinguish that one is coming from a browser and one is something else? I tried to set the user-agent to Mozilla, and it still timed out.

I would appreciate your help on this. Is what I am trying to do possible?

The following is my code which is mostly copied from the net:

use strict;
use LWP::Simple;
use LWP::UserAgent;
my $webpage = "http://www.google.com";
my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
$ua->agent("Mozilla/4.76 [en] (Windows NT 5.0; U)");
$ua->timeout(30);
my $request = HTTP::Request->new('GET', $webpage);
my $response = $ua->request($request);
my $html = $response->content;
print $html;
exit(0);
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