http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=691385

udie has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

hi i am writting a perl code to import contacts from my gmail account. i have used mechanize, the code works fine when run from the ternminal, but when put on a web server and run using a browser i am getting an error which says bad host name,.....the apache log files show that the mechnize agaent($mech) is not able to find the form, but as i said it works perfectly on terminal...i am really stupped could anyone help me.... the code is 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w 
use WWW::Mechanize qw(!head);
use HTTP::Cookies;
use CGI qw(:standard);
use CGI::Carp qw(warningsToBrowser fatalsToBrowser);
print header;
print start_html("email");
$user=param("user");
$pass=param("password");
###go to login page and login.
#$url = "https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=mail&pas
+sive=true&rm=false&continue=https%3A%2F%2Fmail.google.com%2Fmail%2F%3
+Fnsr%3D1%26ui%3Dhtml%26zy%3Dl&bsv=1k96igf4806cy&ltmpl=default&ltmplca
+che=2";
$url="https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLoginAuth?service=mail";
$mech = WWW::Mechanize->new() or die "cannot create a new agent";
$mech->cookie_jar(HTTP::Cookies->new());
$mech->get($url) or die 'cannot get';
print $mech->content();
$mech->form_number(1);
die "not logging in",$mech->response->status_line unless $mech->succes
+s;
$mech->field(Email => 'xxxxxxx');
$mech->field(Passwd => 'yyyyyy');
$mech->submit();
#Go to the next link, now that we are logged in.
$url = 'http://mail.google.com/mail/contacts/data/export?exportType=AL
+L&groupToExport=&out=Google_CSV';
$mech->get($url)||die "din get";
print $mech->content();

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Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: importing contacts using mechanize
by Erez (Priest) on Jun 11, 2008 at 06:37 UTC

    Two things,
    one, a better practice when contacting services is to use a known User Agent, such as my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new( agent => "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4"). Many services, especially Google's, tend to disregard requests from unknown agents, or from LWP::UserAgent's default "libwww-perl/5.8"

    Two, why not use a dedicated module such as Mail::Webmail::Gmail?

    Stop saying 'script'. Stop saying 'line-noise'.
    We have nothing to lose but our metaphors.

[reply]
[d/l]
Re: importing contacts using mechanize
by Anonymous Monk on Jun 11, 2008 at 06:32 UTC
    $mech->get() or die is wrong. You'll never know if get fails (which it probably does, because of firewall or permissions on your webserver) from that statement, because get always returns a HTTP::Response object. Its time to go read the manual.
[reply]
[d/l]
      ya, i used mech->success for the form i assumed that everything else was working fine now ill do the same for all the get functions, but can u help me out to figure out why the code works from the terminal and not from the web server..i am really not understanding this
[reply]

        Most likely you are using different versions of WWW::Mechanize in the console and the webserver, or the user that the webserver is configured to run under does not have the permissions to access network resources.

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Re: importing contacts using mechanize
by Anonymous Monk on Jun 11, 2008 at 06:35 UTC
[reply]
      i have tried using Mail::webmail::gmail, but it doesnt seem to work, the module was written for gmail beta, and i run the example scripts nothing happens, so i thought better off sticking with mechanize, if you can help me out with webmail::gmail, as in if the .pm file has to modified or something, the gmail would be the way to go for me, thanks in advance
[reply]
Re: importing contacts using mechanize
by denishowe (Acolyte) on Jan 21, 2010 at 00:03 UTC
    You might consider WWW::Contact::GoogleContactsAPI. I'm in the process of updating this to handle all the fields in the v3 Contacts API.
[reply]

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