I have some code I've written in PHP for consuming our simple webservice, which I'd also like to provide in Perl for users who may prefer that language. What's the simplest method of making a HTTP request to do that? In PHP I can do it in one line with file_get_contents()
.
Here's the entire code I want to port to Perl:
/**
* Makes a remote call to the our API, and returns the response
* @param cmd {string} - command string ID
* @param argsArray {array} - associative array of argument names and argument values
* @return {array} - array of responses
*/
function callAPI( $cmd, $argsArray=array() )
{
$apikey="MY_API_KEY";
$secret="MY_SECRET";
$apiurl="https://foobar.com/api";
// timestamp this API was submitted (for security reasons)
$epoch_time=time();
//--- assemble argument array into string
$query = "cmd=" .$cmd;
foreach ($argsArray as $argName => $argValue) {
$query .= "&" . $argName . "=" . urlencode($argValue);
}
$query .= "&key=". $apikey . "&time=" . $epoch_time;
//--- make md5 hash of the query + secret string
$md5 = md5($query . $secret);
$url = $apiurl . "?" . $query . "&md5=" . $md5;
//--- make simple HTTP GET request, put the server response into $response
$response = file_get_contents($url);
//--- convert "|" (pipe) delimited string to array
$responseArray = explode("|", $response);
return $responseArray;
}
LWP::Simple:
use LWP::Simple;
$contents = get("http://YOUR_URL_HERE");
LWP::Simple has the function you're looking for.
use LWP::Simple;
$content = get($url);
die "Can't GET $url" if (! defined $content);
Take a look at LWP::Simple.
For more involved queries, there's even a book about it.
I would use the LWP::Simple module.
Mojo::UserAgent is a great option too!
use Mojo::UserAgent;
my $ua = Mojo::UserAgent->new;
# Say hello to the Unicode snowman with "Do Not Track" header
say $ua->get('www.☃.net?hello=there' => {DNT => 1})->res->body;
# Form POST with exception handling
my $tx = $ua->post('https://metacpan.org/search' => form => {q => 'mojo'});
if (my $res = $tx->success) { say $res->body }
else {
my ($err, $code) = $tx->error;
say $code ? "$code response: $err" : "Connection error: $err";
}
# Quick JSON API request with Basic authentication
say $ua->get('https://sri:s3cret@example.com/search.json?q=perl')
->res->json('/results/0/title');
# Extract data from HTML and XML resources
say $ua->get('www.perl.org')->res->dom->html->head->title->text;`
Samples direct from CPAN page. I used this when I couldn 't get LWP::Simple to work on my machine.
Try the HTTP::Request module.
Instances of this class are usually passed to the request() method of an LWP::UserAgent object.
If its in UNIX and if no LWP::Simple installed, you can try
my $content = `GET "http://trackMyPhones.com/"`;
I think what Srihari might be referencing is Wget, but what I would actually recommend (again, on *nix without LSP::Simple) would be to use cURL
$ my $content = `curl -s "http://google.com"`;
<HTML><HEAD><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8">
<TITLE>301 Moved</TITLE></HEAD><BODY>
<H1>301 Moved</H1>
The document has moved
<A HREF="http://www.google.com/">here</A>.
</BODY></HTML>
The -s
flag tells curl to be silent. Otherwise, you get curl's progress bar output on stderr every time.