Perl in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

LWP::Simple

LWP::Simple provides an easy-to-use interface for creating a web client, although it is only capable of performing basic retrieving functions. An object constructor is not used for this class; it defines functions for retrieving information from a specified URL and interpreting the status codes from the requests.

This module isn’t named Simple for nothing. The following shows how to use it to get a web page and save it to a file:

use LWP::Simple;

$homepage = 'oreilly_com.html';
$status = getstore('http:www.oreilly.com/', $homepage);
print("hooray") if is_success($status);

The retrieving functions get and head return the URL’s contents and header contents, respectively. The other retrieving functions return the HTTP status code of the request. The status codes are returned as the constants from the HTTP::Status module, which is also where the is_success and is_failure methods are obtained. See Section 20.3.4 for a listing of the response codes.

The user agent identifier produced by LWP::Simple is LWP::Simple /n.nn, in which n.nn is the version number of LWP being used.

The following are the functions exported by LWP::Simple.