The user agent string clearly wasn't the problem here as YourMother shows. However, claiming to be different browsers is not "nutty".

I've done maybe 1/2 dozen LWP programs and I've found that fiddling with the agent string by claiming to be something really stupid, like Netscape 4.76 can result in getting a returned page that is significantly easier to deal with than whatever the default is. I think that even in one case I was able to get a page without java script in it by just claiming to be "stupid". I'm sure the web developers had to code that as a special case, but evidently they did.

Anyway some experimentation with claiming to be different browser types can sometimes produce interesting results. Of course this is completely site dependent. If you have the wrong level of browser for a site, usually you get a message saying that rather than a 404 (i.e. it will say something rather than remaining silent). Here's how to claim to be "stupid": 

$ua->agent("Mozilla/4.76 [en] (Windows NT 5.0; U)");

[download]

In reply to Re^2: how to troubleshoot a http::request 404 problem by Marshall
in thread how to troubleshoot a http::request 404 problem by lexthoonen

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