My two favourite methods are LWP::Simple and `wget`. For instance: 
  use LWP::Simple;
  my $document = get("http://www.perlmonks.org");

[download]
or 
  my $document = `wget -qO- http://www.perlmonks.org`;

[download]
Most of the time I use LWP::Simple, but sometimes I try to download something from a site for which LWP::Simple doesn't fetch the page. It's usually much easier to use `wget` than to debug why I'm not able to fetch the page with LWP.

If I need something more complex than a few simple downloads, I use WWW::Mechanize or LWP.

In reply to Re: http get with perl, help needed by JavaFan
in thread http get with perl, help needed by perlnewb123

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