anyone know how to save a url request to a txt file? - through cgi, I want to access another page an

I believe you are referring to the LWP module, examples of which can be found in the excellent Perl Cookbook.

I believe the examples are even downloadble from:
http://perl.oreilly.com/

Example code:

use LWP::Simple;
$page = get("http://www.yahoo.com") ;
open (F,">>file.txt") ;
print F $page;
close F;

This will gather Yahoo!'s main page and save it to file.txt

Cheers!
Federico

thank you for the responses!

actually, I wanted to use this as an excercise in Perl. I just started reading up on it and I am very new to this! I was trying to pull stock tickers from yahoo. I was able to write the script, changed permissions to 755 and it errored out. But when I telnet to my server and type "perl (program name).pl" it works?

you said there were some better ways. Could you please expand a little on that? you can email me directly or put it on the forum

to take this a step further how could one specify which parts of the page to save and which parts not to save to a txt file. this way the exact info wanted could be saved without all the other garbage.

thanks in advance

----------
My Site Got Hacked, Check It Out!
http://www.birminghamnet.com

fairhousing-

i parsed the .htm file (which is now a .txt file) until I found the phrase that was above the stock line. Then saved the stock line . It could probably be done much quicker and cleaner, like I said - I am just starting to learn Perl!

Keithl, what's the source for this CGI file. It sounds interesting and I would like to check it out.

-steve

here is the source, Please keep in mind that I am a complete novice at this !!! so dont laugh too hard

#!/usr/bin/perl
use LWP::Simple;
$ft=get("http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=hhs&d=v1");
open (F,">>hhs.htm");
print F $ft;
close F;

$t="hhs.htm";
open (FILE, $t);
my $att=0;

while ( ( $att ==0 ))
{
$line=<FILE>;
chomp ( $line );
if ($line eq "<th nowrap>More Info</th>" )
{
$att=1;
}
}
$line=<FILE>;
$line=<FILE>;
$line=<FILE>;
$line=<FILE>;
$line=<FILE>;
print $line;
close (FILE);
open (QUOTE, ">>stock.txt");
print QUOTE $line;
close (QUOTE);

would anybody have any idea why this would work when I execute the script through telnet and NOT when I execute through the browser? (I set all permissions on ALL files to 755)

keithl: Try this modification.

...
open (FILE, $t);
my $att=0;
print "Content-Type: text/html\n\n";
while ( ( $att ==0 ))
{
$line=<FILE>;
...

You must add the correct content headers before printing anything to a browser.
add this line: print "content-type: text/html\n\n";

Something that catched my attention is the repetition of $line=<FILE>; -- What are you trying to acomplish with this?

i'll try this question again.

how exactly would i pinpoint just the info i wanted to be saved to a text file instead of the whole page. for example, the header on my site "birmingham alabama jobs..." birminghamnet.com. how would i specify the header as the only thing i wanted saved to a txt file?

thanks in advance

----------
My Site Got Hacked, Check It Out!
http://www.birminghamnet.com

this is the only way (I know of right now) to advance the pointer to where I want it to point to (I am SURE there is a better way!)

I just wanted to thank everybody for
a) not laughing to hard !
b) your suggestions

FH,

You would have to parse the fetched page before writing it to the local file. To do that, you'd have to use a couple of regular expressions.

You can read more on regular expressions at http://www.perl.com/CPAN.