I once needed to work with javascript. I just parsed the html and grepped for the variable initialization that I needed and took the value with a regex. No need to execute the code just to concatenate a couple of strings together.

As for the other part of your request regarding an https request, I've had mixed results. I have been unable to get https working through our proxy/firewall at work. I can go through the proxy via http without a problem. A bit of googling leads me to a link dated 2001 that says libwww and crypt::ssleay almost work together but don't.

Here's a short example I've used to illustrate the problem. It fails for me on ActiveState 5.8.4 on xp. (*nix is not an option as this is my work machine, nor is cygwin)

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use LWP::UserAgent;
#http://groups.yahoo.com/group/libwww-perl/message/7242
$|=1;
my @hosts = ('http://login.yahoo.com', 'https://login.yahoo.com');

my $ua=LWP::UserAgent->new;
$ua->agent("Mozilla/5.0 ");

my $https_proxy=$ENV{https_proxy};
delete $ENV{https_proxy} if ($https_proxy);
$ua->env_proxy;
$ENV{https_proxy}=$https_proxy if ($https_proxy);

foreach (@hosts) {
  my $req = HTTP::Request->new(GET => $_);
  #$req->proxy_authorization_basic($ENV{HTTP_PROXY_USER}, $ENV{HTTP_PR
+OXY_PASS});

  my $res = $ua->request($req);

  if ($res->is_success) { print $res->status_line, "\nsomething\n"; }
  else { print $res->status_line, "\nnothing\n"; }
}
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