Cookies when fetching site with perl

Ephracis · 07-12-2005, 07:52 AM

I am writing a script in Perl that uses LWP::UserAgent to fetch a website. But the problem is that the site has a loginsystem based on cookies. So I want to use all the cookies I have in Firefox that is for that site and use them when I fetch the page with my script.

Can this be done?

I looked into cookie_jar but I wasn't sure how to set a couple of cookies. Any help?

Thanks.

btmiller · 07-12-2005, 08:31 PM

Firefox seems to store cookies in a plain text file in ~/.mozilla/firefox/<random-dir>/cookies.txt that you can parse. But there seems to be a HTTP::Cookies::Netscape Perl module that will parse a Netscape compatible cookie file and load it into a cookie jar. I'm not sure if the Firefox cookie file is compatible, but it might be worth looking into. FYI, you can find more info on the HTTP::Cookie Perl module here.

Ephracis · 07-13-2005, 02:31 AM

Thanks, I will check into it ASAP.

Ephracis · 07-14-2005, 03:11 PM

OK, I have tried a bit but no success. I put up a temporary webpage with this code:

Code:

http://dreamland4.gotdns.org/~ephracis/cookies.php:
<?
echo "Foo: < " . $_COOKIE['foo'] . " ><br>\n";
echo "UA : < " . $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] . " ><br>";
?>

I visit the page with Firefox and it looks like:

Quote:

Foo: < >
UA : < Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050524 Firefox/1.0+ >

I have this perl program:

Code:

#!/usr/bin/perl
require LWP::UserAgent;
$ua = new LWP::UserAgent(agent => 'Mozilla/4.0 ()', 'cookie_jar' => {file => "/home/ephracis/programming/perl/cookies.txt"} );
$request = new HTTP::Request('GET', 'http://dreamland4.gotdns.org/~ephracis/cookies.php');
$response = $ua->request($request, \&callback, 4096);

sub callback {
        my($data, $response, $protocol) = @_;
        print "$data \n";
}

It uses this cookie-file:

Code:

#LWP-Cookies-1.0
Set-Cookie3: foor=bar; path="~ephracis"; domain="dreamland4.gotdns.org"; path_spec; expires="2005-07-20 10:10:10Z"; version=0

I run the perl program and get this output:

Code:

$ ./fetchcookies.pl
Foo: <  ><br>
UA : < libwww-perl/5.53 ><br>

Am I missing something here? Shouldn't at least the user agent change?