In the general case, this code would be very fragile. Servers can lie about content length; things can go wrong. You should attempt to try to read a certain number of times, possibly giving up after a series of consective reads that draw zero bytes, and/or return all that you have after a given amount of time.

update to Ilya's response: I should clarify my statement. Several years ago I had that sort of code running in a script, and I came to grief over the problem of content length. It didn't always correspond to what I received. I no longer have access to the code, so I can't go and look it up, but in a nutshell I ignored the content-length value, and just tried to read as much as I could in a certain time frame (45 seconds IIRC).

That said, I'm willing to believe that servers these days are much more reliable, and produce accurate values for content length... although I think I'll always mistrust them.

g r i n d e r
just another bofh

print@_{sort keys %_},$/if%_=split//,'= & *a?b:e\f/h^h!j+n,o@o;r$s-t%t#u';