Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi for some reasons I can't submit this little, simple form with Perl:
<FORM ACTION="/sms/austria.php3" METHOD="post" NAME="austria">
 <SELECT SIZE="1" NAME="austria">
  <OPTION VALUE="error" SELECTED>select Net</OPTION>
  <OPTION VALUE="43664">0664 (A1)</OPTION>
  <OPTION VALUE="43676">0676 (T-Mobile)</OPTION>
  <OPTION VALUE="43699">0699 (ONE)</OPTION>
  <OPTION VALUE="43650">0650 (tele.ring)</OPTION>
 </SELECT>
 <INPUT TYPE="image" SRC="/images/sms/weiter.gif" ALT="weiter" NAME="i
+mage" BORDER="0">
</FORM>

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I set 'austria' to '43699'. $form1->dump gives this: 
POST http://subscriber.chello.at/sms/austria.php3
  austria=43699       (option)  [error|43664|43676|*43699|43650]
  image=<UNDEF>       (image)

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Now I tried various ways to click this form: 
$res = $ub->request($form[1]->click()); 
$res = $ub->request($form[1]->click('image'));
$res = $ub->request($form[1]->click('image',0,0));
$res = $ub->request(POST $URL, @TEL);

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with: 
@TEL = [austria, '43699', 'image.x', '0', 'image.y', '0'];
( or @TEL = [austria, '43699']; )
$URL = 'http://subscriber.chello.at/sms/austria.php3';

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In Perl I always get an empty response: 
_msg => Found
_rc => 302
_content =>

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The Hash of '_request' looks like: 
Request:
_method => POST
_headers => HTTP::Headers=HASH(0x84e0cc4)
_uri => http://subscriber.chello.at/sms/austria.php3
_content => austria=43699&image.x=0&image.y=0

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Using Lynx I can fillout and successfully submit this form. Trace gives me this entries:
GridText - post_data: austria=43699&image.x=0&image.y=0
..
LYpush[0]: address:http://subscriber.chello.at/sms/index.php3
        title:hello, i'm chello
getfile: getting http://subscriber.chello.at/sms/austria.php3

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Does anybody has a hint who I can go on or what I should try to submit this with Perl?

Thanks to all in advance,
Carl

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: submit Form with Lynx but not Perl?
by grantm (Parson) on Aug 05, 2002 at 21:44 UTC

    It looks like your form is being submitted correctly from Perl, and the server response is to redirect you to another URL (response code = 302). You'll need to get the URL out of the 'Location' header of the response object and retrieve that.

    Lynx is following the redirect automatically. You can might want to look at the redirect_ok method of LWP::UserAgent to get similar behaviour

[reply]
      Thanks for th reply, but allowing redirection does not solve the problem. While Lynx get the next page - the Perl-program gets again the initial page.
      Could it be that Lynx writes a coockie on the server, while Perl doesn't do that? Lynx is set that it does not accept any cookie - so no cookie is written on my computer.

      This is from Lynx: 

      LYCookie: Searching for 'subscriber.chello.at:80', '/sms/index.php3'.
Composing Authorization for subscriber.chello.at:80/sms/index.php3
HTAASetup_lookup: No template matched `sms/index.php3' (so probably no
+t protected)
HTTP: Not sending authorization (yet).
Writing:
GET /sms/index.php3 HTTP/1.0
Host: subscriber.chello.at       ....
----------------------------------
HTTP Request is sent.
HTTP: WRITE delivered OK
HTTP Request sent; waiting for answer.
HTTP: Trying to read 1535
HTTP: Read 1448
HTTP: Rx: HTTP/1.1 200 OK
HTTP: Scanned 2 fields from line_buffer
--- Talking HTTP1.
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
....
Connection: close

      [download]
      this I got using Perl (I set in Perl the User-Agent to Lynx 2.8.4rel.1, it could be ...):
      _protocol => HTTP/1.1
_request => HTTP::Request=HASH(0x84e226c)
_headers => HTTP::Headers=HASH(0x84e8fac)
_previous => HTTP::Response=HASH(0x84dfda0)
_msg => OK
_rc => 200

      [download]
      The content of the response (rc=200) is the initial web-page. It is not the next form to enter the sms text.

      Here are the Information of Previous, Headers and Request: 

      Previous:
_protocol => HTTP/1.1
_request => HTTP::Request=HASH(0x84e22a8)
_headers => HTTP::Headers=HASH(0x84dfd94)
_rc => 302
_msg => Found
_content =>

Previous-Headers:
client-transfer-encoding => chunked
client-response-num => 1
location => /sms/index.php3
content-type => text/html
server => Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) PHP/4.2.1
connection => close
date => Tue, 06 Aug 2002 09:28:00 GMT
x-powered-by => PHP/4.2.1
client-date => Tue, 06 Aug 2002 09:28:00 GMT

Previous-Request:
_method => POST
_headers => HTTP::Headers=HASH(0x84e229c)
_uri => http://subscriber.chello.at/sms/austria.php3
_content => austria=43699&image.x=0&image.y=0

Previous-Request-Headers:
user-agent => Lynx/2.8.4rel.1
content-type => application/x-www-form-urlencoded
content-length => 33
   - - - - - - 

Request:
_method => POST
_headers => HTTP::Headers=HASH(0x84dfaac)
_uri => http://subscriber.chello.at/sms/index.php3
_content => austria=43699&image.x=0&image.y=0

Request-Headers:
user-agent => Lynx/2.8.4rel.1
content-type => application/x-www-form-urlencoded
content-length => 33

  - - - - - -

Headers:
client-transfer-encoding => chunked
client-response-num => 1
title => hello, i'm chello
content-type => text/html
server => Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) PHP/4.2.1
x-meta-author => chello broadband B.V 1999
date => Tue, 06 Aug 2002 09:28:05 GMT
connection => close
x-powered-by => PHP/4.2.1
link => </dhtml/style/sliding.css>; rel="stylesheet"; type="text/css"
client-date => Tue, 06 Aug 2002 09:28:10 GMT

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[reply]
[d/l]
[select]

        No, it's not a cookie problem - I can't see any cookie headers in your trace output (and as you say, you have cookies disabled in Lynx anyway).

        Since you're being redirected back to the original page, it looks like there is something wrong with your initial request. My approach would be to use a tool like tcpdump on Linux or Analyzer on Windows to trace the network and compare the Lynx request to the LWP request.

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