cookie_jar is magic. When a user agent (e.g. your browser or your LWP::UserAgent program) is sent cookies, the site expects them echoed back in subsequent requests. However, a cookie can expire after a set amount of time, different sites will send different cookies - and expect only the ones they sent back. In fact different scripts at the same site will send different coookies and expect the right one sent back.

cookie_jar automates all this, including possibly saving cookies to a file for reading on subsequent execution. 

# UNTESTED SNIPPET
use LWP::UserAgent;
$ua = new LWP::UserAgent;
use HTTP::Cookies;
$cookie_jar = HTTP::Cookies->new;
$init_url = 'http://www.domain.com/cgi-bin/whatever.pl?X';
$request = new HTTP::Request('GET', $init_url);
$cookie_jar->extract_cookies($response);

#  later....
$request = new HTTP::Request('GET', 'http://www.domain.com/cgi-bin/wha
+tever.pl?Y';
$cookie_jar->add_cookie_header($request);
$response = $ua->simple_request($request);

[download]
Just extract from responses and add to requests - the cookie_jar does the heavy lifting.

--Bob Niederman, http://bob-n.com

In reply to Re: What is a Cookie Jar? by bobn
in thread What is a Cookie Jar? by rjahrman

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.