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

Hi,

I'm using WWW::Search with the backend WWW::Search::PubMed to try and search this site. The problem is that I get absolutely nothing when I run this:

#! c:\perl\bin

use WWW::Search; 

$query = "lung cancer treatment";
$search = new WWW::Search('PubMed'); 
$search->native_query(WWW::Search::escape_query($query)); 
$search->maximum_to_retrieve(100); 
while (my $result = $search->next_result()) { 
$url = $result->url;
$title = $result->title;
$desc = $result->description; 
print "$result\n";
print "<a href=$url>$title<br>$desc<p>\n"; 
    }

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I know that the WWW::Search module recognizes the search engine because I checked out the content of $engine. This is a tough one because there's no error I can look into. The script runs but retrieves no data. When I do the search manually by going to the page I do get results.

Any suggestions?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: problem with search module
by Lachesis (Friar) on Jul 02, 2003 at 10:46 UTC
    WWW:Search gives you a response method which will return the HTTP::Response object for the most recent query. Inspect that to see if that sheds any light on your problem. 
    my $response = $search->response();
if ($response->is_success) {
    print "Page returned ok";
} else {
    print "error:  " . $response->as_string();
}

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[reply]
[d/l]

      OK, thanks, I tried it and it returns:

      Page returned ok

      Any other ideas?

[reply]
[d/l]
        In that case the page will have been a valid response page so you could grab the content and visually check it. The actual HTML might give you a clue as to what happened, grab it with the $response->as_string();
        You could also get hold of the request object that was used for the search via $response->request();
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