in reply to need help determining which web browsing module to use

Probably there are two components you need to think about: fetching the page and processing it, and a multitude of ways to go about the task. The old school way to go about this might be to use LWP::Simple to fetch the page and HTML::Tree to parse and manipulate the contents. A more modern approach might be to use one of the WWW::Mechanize::xxx suite of modules such as WWW::Mechanize::Firefox.

Optimising for fewest key strokes only makes sense transmitting to Pluto or beyond
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Re^2: need help determining which web browsing module to use
by marto (Cardinal) on Nov 13, 2020 at 03:15 UTC

    "...such as WWW::Mechanize::Firefox."

    Just an FYI, this has been difficult for some time due to the dependency on an old, unsupported Firefox. See Important Notice.

[reply]
      Yes, changes to Firefox caused problems! I use some Firefox plug-ins that aren't compatible with current releases (like SQLite Mgr). So I installed Waterfox and use it to run these older Firefox plug-ins. Whether or not Mechanize::Firefox would work with Waterfox, I don't know. It might. A more promising avenue is probably Mechanize::Chrome. I am having trouble getting that critter built so I can't say how well it works or doesn't work.

      Update: Default cpan install of version 0.60 hangs on one test. However, Corion helped me and..
      cpan CORION/WWW-Mechanize-Chrome-0.61.tar.gz appears to work to force a 0.61 installation. Some test cases don't pass but I don't think that matters. At least installation of the 0.61 version does not "hang" and it gets back to a command prompt.

      As another addendum, I don't recommend Waterfox for browsing. I current just use it to run an SQLite tool that I like and know how to use. I've never bothered to fiddle with the command line tool for SQLite. The GUI tool gives the info that I need and I can test out SQL commands. Once I have a working SQLite command, implementing that in Perl code is fairly straightforward - the magic of the Perl DBI!

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