LWP HTTP response is unreadable

Chewy2426 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I recorded my session using livehttpheaders in Firefox. I'm trying to automate this report using LWP.

When I go to authenticate, I get this unreadable text as a response:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: close
Date: Wed, 06 Oct 2010 22:22:12 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS)
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Length: 84
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
Client-Date: Wed, 06 Oct 2010 22:19:52 GMT
Client-Peer: 174.129.240.62:80
Client-Response-Num: 1
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.4
[download]

☻ [#←ª£│╔(╔═▒│I╩O®┤│╔0▓♂,M-¬H,J╠M-I-Rp-*╩/*ÂÐJ┘¶Ïyµò%µdª(♦º▬↨gµþ┘Þ↨Ï┘ÞC¶Ûâ

Basically a bunch of random characters that aren't part of that character set. I don't think they'll show up properly.

Can anyone give me any insight? It returns a HTTP 200 response and content-type: text/html, so I don't get why it's returning this odd output.

Here's the relevant code with the username and password removed:

my $t = time();
my $resp = $ua->get("https://www.foreclosureradar.com/webservices/auth
+enticate.php?Verb=GET&Domain=foreclosureradar&Password=mypass&Version
+=2.2&Login=mylogin&t=$t");

print $resp->as_string . "\n";
[download]

I'm very stuck and any help would be much appreciated. Thanks!!

Comment on LWP HTTP response is unreadable Select or Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: LWP HTTP response is unreadable by Corion (Patriarch) on Oct 07, 2010 at 07:39 UTC
If the URL works from within the browser, my guess is that the response is `gzip`-encoded. Try looking at `$resp->decoded_content`, the `Transfer-Encoding` header, or look at what WWW::Mechanize does to get at the plain data from gzipped responses.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: LWP HTTP response is unreadable by Anonymous Monk on Oct 10, 2010 at 01:59 UTC
normally gzipped responses have headers that indicate that	[reply]
Re: LWP HTTP response is unreadable by kcott (Archbishop) on Oct 07, 2010 at 02:15 UTC
You're accessing an https URL. The data you're getting back looks like it's encrypted. Try the LWP Cookbook. It has an HTTPS section.	[reply]
Re^2: LWP HTTP response is unreadable by Anonymous Monk on Oct 07, 2010 at 06:37 UTC
The response has nothing to do with HTTPS	[reply]
Re: LWP HTTP response is unreadable by Anonymous Monk on Oct 07, 2010 at 06:35 UTC
so I don't get why it's returning this odd output. Broken server is broken	[reply]