POST $url, [$form_ref], [Header => Value,...] This works mostly like GET() with POST as the method, but this function also takes a second optional array or hash reference parameter ($form_ref). This argument can be used to pass key/value pairs for the form content. By default we will initialize a request using the "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" content type. This means that you can emulate a HTML
POSTing like this: POST 'http://www.perl.org/survey.cgi', [ name => 'Gisle Aas', email => 'gisle@aas.no', gender => 'M', born => '1964', perc => '3%', ]; This will create a HTTP::Request object that looks like this: POST http://www.perl.org/survey.cgi Content-Length: 66 Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded name=Gisle%20Aas&email=gisle%40aas.no&gender=M&born=1964&perc=3%25 ############################# BEEP The POST method also supports the "multipart/form-data" content used for *Form-based File Upload* as specified in RFC 1867. You trigger this content format by specifying a content type of "'form-data'" as one of the request headers. If one of the values in the $form_ref is an array reference, then it is treated as a file part specification with the following interpretation: [ $file, $filename, Header => Value... ] The first value in the array ($file) is the name of a file to open. This file will be read and its content placed in the request. The routine will croak if the file can't be opened. Use an "undef" as $file value if you want to specify the content directly. The $filename is the filename to report in the request. If this value is undefined, then the basename of the $file will be used. You can specify an empty string as $filename if you don't want any filename in the request. Sending my ~/.profile to the survey used as example above can be achieved by this: POST 'http://www.perl.org/survey.cgi', Content_Type => 'form-data', Content => [ name => 'Gisle Aas', email => 'gisle@aas.no', gender => 'M', born => '1964', ############################# BEEP init => ["$ENV{HOME}/.profile"], ] This will create a HTTP::Request object that almost looks this (the boundary and the content of your ~/.profile is likely to be different): POST http://www.perl.org/survey.cgi Content-Length: 388 Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary="6G+f" --6G+f Content-Disposition: form-data; name="name" Gisle Aas --6G+f Content-Disposition: form-data; name="email" gisle@aas.no --6G+f Content-Disposition: form-data; name="gender" M --6G+f Content-Disposition: form-data; name="born" 1964 --6G+f Content-Disposition: form-data; name="init"; filename=".profile" Content-Type: text/plain PATH=/local/perl/bin:$PATH export PATH --6G+f-- If you set the $DYNAMIC_FILE_UPLOAD variable (exportable) to some TRUE value, then you get back a request object with a subroutine closure as the content attribute. This subroutine will read the content of any files on demand and return it in suitable chunks. This allow you to upload arbitrary big files without using lots of memory. You can even upload infinite files like /dev/audio if you wish; however, if the file is not a plain file, there will be no Content-Length header defined for the request. Not all servers (or server applications) like this. Also, if the file(s) change in size between the time the Content-Length is calculated and the time that the last chunk is delivered, the subroutine will "Croak".