In a project of mine I need to send a POST statement to a webserver. I looked at LWP and LWP::UserAgent and didn't quite see what I needed -- I think. What I ended up doing was making my own Socket connection, and then printing a POST statement to it (code below) and reading in the results.

So fellow monks, based on the code below, did I need to roll my own? I'm sure somebody else can write this networking stuff better than I can.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use IO::Socket;
use strict;

my $socket = &new_socket( { host => "foo.com", port => 80 } );
print $socket &new_post( { data => "foobar", 
                           path => "/cgi-bin/foobar.pl", 
                           host => "http://www.foo.com", 
                           referer => "http://www.foo.com/baz.html" 
                       } );

print OUT while( <$socket> );

#########################################

sub new_socket {
    my( $args ) = @_;
    return IO::Socket::INET->new( PeerAddr => $$args{host},
                                  PeerPort => $$args{port},
                                  Proto    => "tcp",
                                  Type     => SOCK_STREAM );
} 

sub new_post {
    my( $args ) = @_;

    my $length = length( $$args{data} );

    my $post  = "POST $$args{path} HTTP/1.0\n";
       $post .= "Host: $$args{host}\n";

       $post .= "Accept: text/html, text/plain, text/richtext";
       $post .= ", text/enriched\n";

       $post .= "Accept-Encoding: gzip, compress\n";
       $post .= "Accept-Language: en\n";
       $post .= "Pragma: no-cache\n";
       $post .= "Cache-Control: no-cache\n";
       $post .= "User-Agent: Lynx/2.8.3dev.18 libwww-FM/2.14\n";
       $post .= "Referer: $$args{referer}\n";
       $post .= "Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\n";
       $post .= "Content-length: $length\n\n";

       $post .= "$$args{data}\n";

       return $post;
}
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