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

I have this script where the content that it return is human-readable on my machine. But when I run the same script on another machine, it returns garbled message.

Both machines are Redhat 5. 

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use WWW::Mechanize;

my $m = WWW::Mechanize->new;
$m->get( 'http://www.google.com' );
print $m->content;

[download]

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Mechanize Returns Garbled Content
by ikegami (Patriarch) on Jun 28, 2011 at 22:22 UTC
    What do you get from 
    print $m->response->headers->as_string;

    [download]
[reply]
[d/l]
      Both machines returned some header information. On the 'good' machine, it returned this. 
      Cache-Control: private, max-age=0
Connection: close
Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2011 22:45:06 GMT
Server: gws
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
Expires: -1
Client-Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2011 22:43:19 GMT
Client-Peer: xx.xx.xx.xx:80
Client-Response-Num: 1
Set-Cookie: PREF=ID=c390276a4d39152b:FF=0:TM=1309301106:LM=1309301106:
+S=OOuAOCNBYRLJCHWp; expires=Thu, 27-Jun-2013 22:45:06 GMT; path=/; do
+main=.google.com
Set-Cookie: NID=48=H5aMKdl8PlT40vE7xU3rxWQ0Py7lY4AXt8L-BJ9q3ZIp4QN8riF
+AnUTh_gYtX6s_dG-pf3FFPKLs1M80BC2z3SDbma5vGWFi_h0wgCmHSbQzCYFW0nD2KoyE
+I4FxEukb; expires=Wed, 28-Dec-2011 22:45:06 GMT; path=/; domain=.goog
+le.com; HttpOnly
Title: Google
X-Meta-Description: Search the world's information, including webpages
+, images, videos and more. Google has many special features to help y
+ou find exactly what you're looking for.
X-Meta-Robots: noodp
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block

      [download]
      On the 'bad' machine, it returned this. 
      Cache-Control: private, max-age=0
Connection: close
Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2011 22:45:19 GMT
Server: gws
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Length: 6075
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Expires: -1
Client-Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2011 22:45:19 GMT
Client-Peer: xx.xx.xx.xx:80
Client-Response-Num: 1
Set-Cookie: PREF=ID=ee94fe222925b98d:FF=0:TM=1309301119:LM=1309301119:
+S=93SJpaSxcxzXIjMh; expires=Thu, 27-Jun-2013 22:45:19 GMT; path=/; do
+main=.google.com
Set-Cookie: NID=48=Zvuevcb_CgIY6rP-Gq65L1oR6r41cs3nYFNAFNoYfwOqFZxcBhr
+bW_x4PTjTfgVmh7fovclmf2dWwJu6F-c6NGvMQhdoASsxN07mlNVP1Pi7XbeL6LeqkhJ9
+Jvy8wCj7; expires=Wed, 28-Dec-2011 22:45:19 GMT; path=/; domain=.goog
+le.com; HttpOnly
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block

      [download]
      Both response are different and the 'bad' machine seems to think that the content is gzip?
[reply]
[d/l]
[select]

        Content-Encoding: gzip accounts for the garbling, but WWW::Mechanize uses ->decoded_content to handle that. Try upgrading

        • WWW::Mechanize
        • IO::Uncompress::Gunzip
        • HTTP::Message
[reply]
[d/l]
[select]

        "Line 5 from the good machine: Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
        Line 7 from the "bad" machine: Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8        "

        Could the bolded difference make a difference?

[reply]
Re: Mechanize Returns Garbled Content
by trwww (Priest) on Jun 28, 2011 at 22:31 UTC

    or what about:

    print $m->res->decoded_content

    ?

    EDIT: your code works fine for me... maybe there is a proxy between you and google that compresses the data?

    EDIT 2: I didn't see where you said it was working ok on your machine... my guess is still some type of proxy between the machine it is not working properly on and google.

[reply]
[d/l]
      On the 'good' machine, it returned the google content page. On the 'bad' machine, it did not return anything.
[reply]
      I spoke to our admin people and they confirmed that there is no proxy sitting between the 'bad' machine and google.
[reply]
Re: Mechanize Returns Garbled Content
by bichonfrise74 (Vicar) on Jun 29, 2011 at 00:38 UTC
    Maybe you should look at what you are sending? Eg. run tcpdump when you run your script?
[reply]
Re: Mechanize Returns Garbled Content
by Anonymous Monk on Jun 29, 2011 at 17:08 UTC
    As Ikegami suggested, I tried to update 'IO::Compress::Gunzip' on the 'bad' machine and found out that that module was not even installed.

    When I installed it, everything became okay where the content is no longer garbled and everything is human readable.

    Question:
    Is this a bug in Mechanize? Shouldn't it fail when it cannot gunzip a gzip content?
[reply]

Back to Seekers of Perl Wisdom