2005/05/23 LWP (Library for WWW in Perl)

If you want to automatically process web pages to extract data, you have a number of tools available. You can bring a web page down to your computer using "curl" or "wget"

curl http:.//aplawrence.com > mysite
 

If you don't really want the html, use "lynx --dump http://whatever.com > /yourstorage/whatever.txt" to get a text representation of the page. Check the man page for options you might want like "--nolist" and also see lynx alternatives

You can also easily be selective and pull only the data you want from a page with simple Perl scripts.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use LWP::Simple;  
$url = 'http://aplawrence.com";   
$content = get $url;     
print $content;
 

And then of course you'd process the $content as desired. It's only a little more complex if you are dealing with forms; see /Words/2005_03_05.html for a small example of that.

A book that covers LWP is reviewed at /Books/webc.html.

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