Hello fellow Monks,

USPS.com recently made a change to their Zip Lookup program. I tried to automate a query with the following script:

#!/opt/gnu-irix/bin/perl

use strict;

use HTTP::Request::Common qw(POST);
use LWP::UserAgent;

my $ua = new LWP::UserAgent;

my $url = 'http://www.usps.com/zip4/zip4_response.jsp';

my $data = [
        'Selection' => '1',
        'address1' => $ARGV[0],
        'address2' => '',
        'city' => '',
        'state' => '',
        'zipcode' => $ARGV[1],
        'Submit' => ''
    ];

$ua = new LWP::UserAgent;
my $resp = $ua->request(POST $url, $data);

if ($resp->is_success())
{
  print $resp->content();
}
else
{
  print "OOPS\n", $resp->as_string();
}

[download]

At the command prompt, I typed:

address.pl '1713 62nd Avenue' '20785'

[download]

And got this response:

OOPS
HTTP/1.1 500 (Internal Server Error) Server Error
Connection: close
Date: Fri, 16 Aug 2002 15:20:52 GMT
Server: Netscape-Enterprise/6.0
Content-Length: 305
Content-Type: text/html
Client-Date: Fri, 16 Aug 2002 15:20:45 GMT
Client-Peer: 56.0.78.66:80
Title: Server Error

<HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Server Error</TITLE></HEAD>
<BODY><H1>Server Error</H1>
This server has encountered an internal error which prevents it from f
+ulfilling your request. The most likely
cause is a misconfiguration. Please ask the administrator
to look for messages in the server's error log.
</BODY></HTML>

[download]

I urgently need an explanation for this. My initial thought is that LWP cannot interface with Java servlets (.jsp does indicate a java servlet, right?). Your feedback is greatly needed and appreciated.

In reply to PLEASE ADVISE: Has USPS banned LWP??? by Shizzle

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