In your case, the code will look like:

use LWP;
use HTTP::Request::Common;

my $start_town = "Guildford"; 
my $destination_town = "Portsmouth"; 

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
# alter ua here if needed
my $response = $ua->simple_request(POST
  "http://212.87.65.227/bin/query.exe/en",
  [ to => $start_town, from => $destination_town ]
);

if ($response->is_success) {
  print $response->content;
} else {
  print "ERROR: ", $response->status_line;
}
[download]

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

UPDATE prepare to dopeslap yourself -- I bet the root problem is that you've misspelled the name of the module HTTP::Headers -- note the 's' on the end! So make that change and go back to your old code. BTW this also makes sense of the error message; the Request object expects the third argument to be an anonymous array of an HTTP::Headers object and an anonymous array of the content, i.e. [$header, [$content]] ... the way it is now, it sees first the reference to the array whose sole member is $content, and that's not a blessed reference.

What's going on is that one of the modules you are using uses HTTP::Message internally -- and there are a couple of candidates here (HTTP:::Request is a subclass of HTTP::Message) -- and you've subtly messed up a call to a constructor. I'm not feeling generous enough with my time to track down *which* one for you, but go over the documentation for the objects you're instantiating and make sure those calls pass in the right kinds of arguments.

I'm not sure you need to explicitly use all those modules, either. Try it with just use LWP::UserAgent left in there and see if that works. It may even solve your problem.

Side note: when you get errors you don't understand, you can often get a lot more info by calling perldoc perldiag and searching for (the generic part of) your error message. Similar results can be obtained by putting use diagnostics at the top of your script.

response to myself ... you don't need HTTP::Headers at all. Here's working code, culled from perldoc lwpcook and modified to fit your example (note, the only module you explicitly have to use is LWP::UserAgent) :

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

use LWP::UserAgent;
my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new();

my $req = HTTP::Request->new(POST=>'http://212.87.65.227/bin/query.exe
+/en');
  
$req->content_type('application/x-www-form-urlencoded');
$req->content('to=Guildford&from=Portsmouth');
my $res = $ua->request($req);

if ($res->is_success) {
 print $res->content;
} else {
 print "Error: ", $res->status_line, "\n";
}
[download]

But you should read a little further down lwpcook, because you are constructing the content the hard way. See my other post in this thread.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker