LWP Post And My Pained Brain

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

I've been sitting here the better part of a few hours trying to get a simple POST to a form to work using the LWP module. I've tried a few different ways of building the request, but no matter what I do, I get back a 400 error from apache. Here's the code I'm using now:

my $req = new HTTP::Request POST => '$sitehit';
$req->content_type('application/x-www-form-urlencoded');
$req->content('siteurl=$incoming{\'site\'}');
my $res = $ua->request($req); 
print "<br>Result:<br>\n";
print $res->as_string;
[download]

$sitehit is defined with a fully qualified URL to a PHP script looking for form input.

$incoming{'site'} is defined with a dummy URL just to give it something to pass to the form.

I have it printing all variables to the screen before it makes it's requests, so I know they are defined properly. Each time I run the script, I get back this:
400 (Bad Request) URL must be absolute

I know it's got to be something simple I overlooked. This is my first attempt at using LWP and the POST method. Any help at all is greatly appreciated.

Comment on LWP Post And My Pained Brain Download Code

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Re: LWP Post And My Pained Brain by LTjake (Prior) on Nov 24, 2003 at 03:02 UTC
It's late on a sunday evening, but, items in single quotes do not interpolate. ex: `$site = 'abc'; print '$site';` [download] output: `$site` [download] HTH -- "To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer." --Paul Ehrlich	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: LWP Post And My Pained Brain by pg (Canon) on Nov 24, 2003 at 03:06 UTC
$sitehit in first line is not resolved. Use double quotes, instead of single ones (or in this case, simply don't use quotes). Try to run the following and observe the _uri portion: `use Data::Dumper; use HTTP::Request; my $sitehit = "abcdefg"; my $req = new HTTP::Request POST => '$sitehit'; $req->content_type('application/x-www-form-urlencoded'); $req->content('siteurl=$incoming{\'site\'}'); print Dumper($req);` [download] Compare with this: `use Data::Dumper; use HTTP::Request; my $sitehit = "abcdefg"; my $req = new HTTP::Request POST => "$sitehit"; $req->content_type('application/x-www-form-urlencoded'); $req->content('siteurl=$incoming{\'site\'}'); print Dumper($req);` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: LWP Post And My Pained Brain by fuzzball (Initiate) on Nov 24, 2003 at 05:01 UTC
Thank you kindly. Seems the quotes were my problem. Just getting back into coding after quite a long break and I think I'm a bit more rusty than I had anticipated. Thanks for the help.	[reply]
Re: LWP Post And My Pained Brain by iburrell (Chaplain) on Nov 25, 2003 at 01:07 UTC
LWP does have a helper function in HTTP::Request::Common that constructs the query string for you. `use HTTP::Request::Common qw(POST); my $request = POST($url, [ siteurl => $incoming{site} ]);` [download] It also handles multipart/form-data POSTs and file uploads.	[reply] [d/l]