Transparently Handling GZip Encoded content with WWW::Mechanize

Question

Hi,

I am using WWW::Mechanize and currently handling HTTP responses with the 'Content-Encoding: gzip' header in my code by first checking the response headers and then using IO::Uncompress::Gunzip to get the uncompressed content.

However I would like to do this transparently so that WWW::Mechanize methods like form(), links() etc work on and parse the uncompressed content. Since WWW::Mechanize is a sub-class of LWP::UserAgent, I would prefer to use the LWP::UA::handlers to do this.

While I have been partly successful (I can print the uncompressed content for example), I am unable to do this transparently in a way that I can call

$mech->forms();

In summary: How do I "replace" the content inside the $mech object so that from that point onwards, all WWW::Mechanize methods work as if the Content-Encoding never happened?

I would appreciate your attention and help. Thanks

Answer 1

It looks to me like you can replace it by using the $res->content( $bytes ) member.

By the way, I found this stuff by looking at the source of LWP::UserAgent, then HTTP::Response, then HTTP::Message.

Answer 2

http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?WWW::Mechanize::GZip I think.