WWW::Mechanize is a wonderful tool. However, there are all sorts of little things that I like to add that extend beyond what it's intended to do. Some of these issues are "Perl only" (such as Detecting stringified references with WWW::Mechanize), and others are more generic, such as detecting when an HTML entity has been encoded twice (e.g., & -- we had methods that shouldn't be encoding their output, but they did and then they got encoded again in Mason).

To deal with the double-encoding problem, I added a very simple line to my overloaded content() method (see above link):

    if ($content =~ /(&(?:[lg]t|amp|quot);)/) {
        carp "Possible double-encoded HTML entity ($1) found in result
+s";
    }

[download]

However, I can think of several other potential issues I would like to check and make warnings for them optional by instantiating my subclass with a hashref and suppressing warnings that I don't want (maybe a page is trying to display HTML entity codes and wants them double-encoded):

  my $mech = WWW::Mechanize::Warnings->new(
      stringified_references => 1,
      valid_dtd              => 1,
      encoded_entities       => 0,
      valid_html             => 1,
  );

[download]

I think the warnings should be on by default, so only the "encoded_entities" key/value pair would be strictly necessary in the hypothetical constructor above.

What else would you want to see in such a module? If it's anything tricky, implementation ideas would be welcome.

Cheers,
Ovid

New address of my CGI Course.

In reply to Customizing WWW::Mechanize by Ovid

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