It works in Firefox, why not in $mech? (aka WWW::Mechanize::Debug) [resend]

[Peter Stevens]

Hi everyone,

[Someone just asked me about this, and it looks like the attachment got eaten,
in any case I couldn't find it in an online archive of libwww, so here it is
again in-line.

I have found the attached module to be useful when debugging.
This tells you (I think) what $mech is sending to the server on a click()
operation without needing to resort to tcpdump.

In your code, you'll need

use WWW::Mechanize::Debug;

my $mech = WWW::Mechanize::Debug->new(...)

# when you're ready to $mech->click();

print "Request is" . $mech->simulated_click();

Compare this output from what TamperData or LiveHTTPHeaders shows you
when submitting the same request, and chances are, you've found your
problem :-)

Cheers,

Peter

--
Free Cellphone Monitoring Service
www.MinuteWatcher.com


-------------
package WWW::Mechanize::Debug;

# (c) 2006 Peter Stevens. peter (dot) stevens (at) ch-open (dot) ch
# This module may be disutributed under the same conditions as perl itself.

# Debug routine(s?) for use with WWW::Mechanize
#
use strict;
use warnings FATAL => 'all';
our $VERSION = '0.03';

use base qw( WWW::Mechanize );

sub new {
    my $class = shift;
    my %args = @_;
    my $self = $class->SUPER::new( %args );
    return $self;
}

sub simulated_click {
# invoke this method where you would invoke $mech->click() to find out what will
# be sent to the server. Compare the results with Firefox/TamperData. If the
# requests are the same, the results should be the same.
#
    my $this = shift;
    my @args = @_ ;
    my ( $f, $r, $t);
    $f = $this->current_form();  # or one of its cousins - gives an HTML::Forms 
object
    $r = $f->click( @args );    # gives HTTP::Request object
    $r = $this->_modify_request( $r );  # v1.12 internal routine.  
Compatibility?
    $t = $r->as_string();        # text of the request to compare with Tamper 
Data results.
    return $t;
}

return 1;