LWP-UserAgent-Request.pl - Login to facebook.com

Perl Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples

∟LWP-UserAgent-Request.pl - Login to facebook.com

This section provides a tutorial example on how to use LWP-UserAgent-Request.pl to login to facebook.com. The key part is to figure out the POST URI and data value names from HTML form source code.

Ready to try to login to facebook.com with LWP-UserAgent-Request.pl? Here is my test result:

herong> LWP-UserAgent-Request.pl GET http://www.facebook.com

GET http://www.facebook.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1)

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Location: https://www.facebook.com/
...

GET https://www.facebook.com/
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1)

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Set-Cookie: datr=PFQSUx4ndUAvvRdpNGJj_ANT; ...
...

herong> LWP-UserAgent-Request.pl
   POST https://www.facebook.com/login.php?login_attempt=1
   "email=your_email&pass=your_pass"

POST https://www.facebook.com/login.php?login_attempt=1
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1)
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Cookie: datr=PFQSUx4ndUAvvRdpNGJj_ANT; ...
Cookie2: $Version="1"

email=your_email&pass=your_pass

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
...

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en" id="facebook" class="no_js">
...
</body></html>

The output confirms that the cookie management logic is working:

When the first call was executed, cookie "datr" was received in the response from facebook server. And it was saved into the "HTTP-Cookies.jar" file.
When the second call was executed, the same cookie "datr" was attached in the request to inform facebook server that this call is related to the first call.

When I saved the last response into an HTML file and viewed it in a real browser, It showed the "The password you entered is incorrect. Please try again (make sure your caps lock is off)" message because entered a wrong password.

Now you can try to use LWP-UserAgent-Request.pl to play with your own Web applications. The key part of using LWP-UserAgent-Request.pl is that you have to figure out the POST URI and data value names from HTML form source code.