jcdento has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello, I am having some trouble running a secure login script. I need mechanize for its link following capabilities, yet i cannot get mech to login using the identical commands as the version of the script using LWP::UserAgent. I am using: 
$response = $agent->get($url);
my $form = HTML::Form->parse($response->{_content}, $response->base())
+;
$form->param("username", "---------");
$form->param("password", "---------");
$response = $agent->request($form->click);

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then when i print response content, when $agent is of LWP::Agent i am logged in, but with WWW::Mechanize I am redirected to the login screen. This is EXTREMELY frustrating since this isnt even supposed to be what I am doing for the main part of this project. any help would be greatly appreciated.

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Re: LWP::UserAgent vs WWW::Mechanize
by pc88mxer (Vicar) on Jun 13, 2008 at 15:53 UTC
    when $agent is of LWP::Agent i am logged in, but with WWW::Mechanize I am redirected to the login screen.
    Do you mean LWP::UserAgent?

    It just so happens that WWW:Mechanize is a sub-class of LWP::UserAgent. So if you can't figure out what's going wrong, an option is to use LWP::UserAgent methods to log in and WWW::Mechanize methods for everything else.

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      yes, sorry i meant LWP::UserAgent. The thing is, i am using identical methods in both scripts, and lwp is working, and mech isnt. My objects are: 
      y $agent = LWP::UserAgent->new(cookie_jar => HTTP::Cookies->new, reque
+sts_redirectable => [ 'GET', 'HEAD', 'POST' ]);
$agent->agent( 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8
+.1.14) Gecko/20080404 Firefox/2.0.0.14');
$agent->default_header('Accept' => "text/xml,application/xml,applicati
+on/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5", 
               'Accept-Language' => "en-us,en;q=0.5",
               'Accept-Charset' => "ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7",
               'Keep-Alive' => "300",
               'Connection' => "keep-alive");

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      and 
      my $agent = WWW::Mechanize->new(autocheck=>1, agent=> 'Mozilla/5.0 (Wi
+ndows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.14) Gecko/20080404 Firefox/
+2.0.0.14');
$agent->max_redirect(100);
$agent->default_header('Accept' => "text/xml,application/xml,applicati
+on/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5", 
               'Accept-Language' => "en-us,en;q=0.5",
               'Accept-Charset' => "ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7",
               'Accept-Encoding' => "gzip,deflate",
               'Keep-Alive' => "300",
               'Connection' => "keep-alive",
               'TE' => "");

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        WWW::Mechanize's version of ->request modifies the request before issuing it, and that could be the problem. Try this: 
        $agent = WWW::Mechanize->new(...);
...set up $agent...
$agent->LWP::UserAgent::request($form->click);

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Re: LWP::UserAgent vs WWW::Mechanize
by Anonymous Monk on Jun 14, 2008 at 08:16 UTC
    If you're going to use WWW::Mechanize, write 
    $agent->get($url);
if( $agent->success ){
    $agent->form_number(1);
    $agent->form_with_fields(qw' username password ');

    $agent->field("username", "---------");
    $agent->field("password", "---------");
    
    $agent->submit;

    if( $agent->success ){
        die "I logged in, now I die";
    }
}

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    remember, WWW::Mechanize is Handy web browsing in a Perl object :D
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