I've been coding an Everything2 client as a learning exercise. Yesterday I was coding the portion that logs the user in; it posts the appropriate form and gets the cookie from the response to use for future logins.

# build POST request
my $req = HTTP::Request->new('POST', $postURL);  # $postURL is "http:/
+/everything2.org/index.pl"
$req->content_type('application/x-www-form-urlencoded');
$req->content($postData);  # $postData is "op=login&username=FOO&passw
+ord=BAR" or somesuch

# get the page
my $response = $ua->request($req);

if ($response->is_success) {
    # extract the cookie from the response and return the HTTP::Cookie
+s object
    $loginCookieJar->extract_cookies($response);
    $loginCookieJar;
} else {
    die "Could not log in.\n";
}

[download]

The cookie wasn't appearing. I searched Perl Monks and found a similar problem, but the solution was a hand-rolled cookie-stripping function, which sounded like no fun to me.

(On that node, the author talked about "drilling down" into the HTTP::Cookies object to see if his data was there. What's this?)

I mentioned in passing on E2 that I was busy being confused at HTTP::Cookies, and user Cow Of Doom mentioned he'd come across a bug in that package where it could get 3-part domain names (http://www.everything2.org/) but not two-part (http://everything2.org/). He'd discovered it while coding a node tracker for E2, and it had taken him a week to figure out what was wrong.

I went back to my code, added a "www." before my domain names, ran the script, and it worked.

Is this actually a bug, or are we both missing something? If it is a bug, has anyone else run into it?

In reply to Bug in HTTP::Cookies? by donfreenut

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