Determining content-length for an HTTP Post

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

I'm using the YouTube API and they require a user to send an HTTP post with the 'data' of a video (title, description, etc) in XML format. I find the size of my xml using
length($xmldata);
and it returns me the correct number of bytes.
However, when I set up my headers for my post and include this content-length, it seems as if the content-length value is too high because I get the following when I run the script from the command line:

 % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time 
+ Current Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
  0     0    0     0    0     0      0      0 --:--:--  0:00:42 --:--:
+--     0
[download]

...it's as if it is waiting for more data from me.
I tinkered with the content-length and found a good value where the post was accepted and went through perfectly, but I need my program to figure out this value.

Any suggestions on how content-length works in http headers and how I can get the correct value to send? I also tried opening/writing/closing a file and then doing a filesize on the file, but it's the same value as the perl 'length' function.

Thank you

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Re: Determining content-length for an HTTP Post by WizardOfUz (Friar) on Nov 25, 2009 at 17:46 UTC
Just to rule out an encoding issue: Have you tried using the `bytes` pragma?	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Determining content-length for an HTTP Post by Anonymous Monk on Nov 25, 2009 at 17:49 UTC
How would I go about using it?	[reply]
Re^3: Determining content-length for an HTTP Post by WizardOfUz (Friar) on Nov 25, 2009 at 17:53 UTC
`use bytes; my $length_in_bytes = length( $xmldata );` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re^4: Determining content-length for an HTTP Post by ikegami (Patriarch) on Nov 25, 2009 at 18:38 UTC
Re^5: Determining content-length for an HTTP Post by WizardOfUz (Friar) on Nov 25, 2009 at 19:44 UTC
Some notes below your chosen depth have not been shown here
Re: Determining content-length for an HTTP Post by Anonymous Monk on Nov 25, 2009 at 17:47 UTC
I think I just discovered the problem. I am sending the post as `Content-Type:application/atom+xml; charset=UTF-8` [download] It's possible that the number of bytes once it's been converted to this content-type is different than the ascii value. How would I go about determining the length/size of my data if the type is "Content-Type:application/atom+xml; charset=UTF-8" ?	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Determining content-length for an HTTP Post by WizardOfUz (Friar) on Nov 25, 2009 at 17:50 UTC
See above :-)	[reply]
Re^3: Determining content-length for an HTTP Post by Anonymous Monk on Nov 25, 2009 at 17:56 UTC
Thank you, I looked it up and tried it, but it's returning the same numerical value as it did before I added 'use bytes;' to my program. Where do I go from here?	[reply]
Re^4: Determining content-length for an HTTP Post by WizardOfUz (Friar) on Nov 25, 2009 at 18:05 UTC