Download only part of a file from the web

[funstence]

Hi all, I have a script which downloads FLV files (using wget). I've read about LWP::UserAgent, and HTTP::Request::Common but I couldn't find a way to download just part of the file. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks,

[Anonymous Monk]

Re: Download resumer

[avid]

Any update? Or does anyone know of any tool that allows restricting the download size?

I am also trying to write a tool to automate analysis of flv files on the web. The clip analysis can be done with a header preview, so I want similar functionality to avoid full download.

Best regards,
-Avid (seeker of perl wisdom)

[tilly]

LWP::UserAgent has a max_size method that can limit the size that will be retrieved to a fixed number of bytes.

Or you can be more ambitious and pass a :content_cb callback to the get method. This will give you the response in chunks and you can then accumulate them in a variable. When your analysis says that you have enough you can die to end the request, and catch that at a higher level with an eval. This will be a lot more complex, but avoids having to guess how much of the file to download.

[DigitalKitty]

Hi funstence.

I wrote a simple program that you might find useful.


#!/usr/bin/perl 
use warnings;
use strict;
use LWP::Simple; 

my $file = 'test.txt'; 
my $content = get('http://www. google.com'); 

open FH, " >", "$file" or die "Error: $!\n"; 
print FH $content until -s $file >= 25; 

# I routinely include code to check for a successful closing
# of the filehandle since a hardware error could occur.
close FH or die "Error: $!\n";



Hope this helps,
~Katie