Hello, I'm making a mechanized Perl script that collects images for a school project, by downloading them. These images are generated by PHP. My problem is that when I downloaded an image, Linux (Ubuntu distr.) doesn't recognizes it as an image (despite of all the file extensions I've tried so far), but as a plain text file. I've tried to download other PHP images, and it worked fine with downloading these and viewing them. Therefore I think the reason of my issue is the rather strange URL of the image. The URL consists of an HTML GET method, but with not subdirectory. However, when I downloaded these images manually with Firefox, it worked. Another odd thing is that, when I view the image - downloaded by Firefox - the image doesn't has a file extension, however, when i view the properties of this file, it see the type of this file is JPEG. The image URL is as follows: 
        http://www.site.com/images/?id=345435

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The Perl modules that I use: 
    WWW::Mechanize; # to browse through the site
    LWP::UserAgent; # for downloading the images

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The actual Perl code I use for downloading the images: 
    # load modules
    WWW::Mechanize;
    LWP::UserAgent;
    
    # create new sessions
    $mechanize = WWW::Mechanize->new(autocheck => 1); # "autocheck => 
+1" will show possible errors
    $useragent = LWP::UserAgent->new;
    
    # define useragent
    $agent = "Mozilla/5.0";
    $mechanize->agent($useragent);
    $useragent->agent($agent);

    # define the url
    $mechanize->get("http://www.site.com/images/");
    
    # fetch the content
    $content = $mechanize->content();
    
    # get the image url by parsing the content with regular expression
+s
    $content =~ /<tr><td><img src="(.+)" alt="php-image" \/><\/td><\/t
+r>/; # the url will be extracted to $1

    # download the image
    $time = time();
    $useragent->mirror($1, "/home/cafaro/images/$time.jpg");
    
    # provide output
    print "The image ($time.jpg) has been saved.\n";

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I hope I gave enough information. Cheers, cafaro

In reply to Downloading PHP-generated images using the LWP::UserAgent and WWW::Mechanize modules by cafaro

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