or in other words: is :read_size_hint the implementation of the HTTP ranges you are talking about?

If i remember the hint word is there because there is no guarantee that the chunk retrieved will be exactly $bytes long: it is merely a hint, which LWP may disregard.

Even with such recomendation i remember i read somewhere, the following example seems to demonstrate that data is retrieved exactly by chunks of desired length, even for bizarre values of $bytes

Obviosly the last chunk will be of arbitrary lenght.

thanks

L*

is :read_size_hint the implementation of the HTTP ranges you are talking about?

It is one implementation of it but requires careful use of the callback. As you can see from your code, it downloads all the content but in chunks of your specified size. Since the object here is rather only to download the minumum amount of data from the server, the callback must die to stop the subsequent chunks being retrieved. eg:

#!/usr/bin/env perl 
use strict;
use warnings;
use utf8;

use strict;
use warnings;
use LWP::UserAgent;

# Modify these three variables only to suit
my $url        = 'http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1533.txt.utf-8'; # M
+acBeth
my $wantlines  = 30; # Retrieve this number of lines
my $bytes      = 256; # Chunk size to download

my $firstndata;
my $linecount  = 0;
my $chunkcount = 0;

sub add_chunk {
    my ($chunk, $res, $proto) = @_;
    $firstndata .= $chunk;
    $linecount += () = $chunk =~ /\n/g;
    $chunkcount++;
    die if $linecount >= $wantlines;
}

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
my $res = $ua->get ($url, ':content_cb' => \&add_chunk, ':read_size_hi
+nt' => $bytes);

print "Retrieved $linecount lines in $chunkcount chunks from $url:\n\n
+$firstndata\n";
[download]

If you run this, you will see that it retrieves slightly more than the 30 lines required, but substantially less than the full text. This seems like a reasonable compromise and is, of course, tunable by the user to the specific task at hand by varying $wantlines and $bytes.

thank you Discipulus!