Launch the WWW::Mechanize browser

    use WWW::Mechanize;
    my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new( autocheck => 1 );

The "autocheck => 1" tells Mechanize to die if any IO fails, so you don't have to manually check. It's easier that way. If you want to do your own error checking, leave it out.

Fetch a page

    $mech->get( "http://search.cpan.org" );
    print $mech->content;

"$mech->content" contains the raw HTML from the web page. It is not parsed or handled in any way, at least through the "content" method.

Fetch a page into a file

Sometimes you want to dump your results directly into a file. For example, there's no reason to read a JPEG into memory if you're only going to write it out immediately. This can also help with memory issues on large files.

    $mech->get( "http://www.cpan.org/src/stable.tar.gz",
                ":content_file" => "stable.tar.gz" );

Fetch a password-protected page

Generally, just call "credentials" before fetching the page.

    $mech->credentials( 'admin' => 'password' );
    $mech->get( 'http://10.11.12.13/password.html' );
    print $mech->content();

Find all image links

Find all links that point to a JPEG, GIF or PNG.

    my @links = $mech->find_all_links(
        tag => "a", url_regex => qr/\.(jpe?g|gif|png)$/i );

Find all download links

Find all links that have the word "download" in them.

    my @links = $mech->find_all_links(
        tag => "a", text_regex => qr/\bdownload\b/i );

See what will be sent without actually sending anything

    $mech->add_handler("request_send", sub { shift->dump; exit; });
    $mech->get("http://www.example.com");