Chapter 1. Introduction to Web Automation

LWP (short for "Library for World Wide Web in Perl") is a set of Perl modules and object-oriented classes for getting data from the Web and for extracting information from HTML. This chapter provides essential background on the LWP suite. It describes the nature and history of LWP, which platforms it runs on, and how to download and install it. This chapter ends with a quick walkthrough of several LWP programs that illustrate common tasks, such as fetching web pages, extracting information using regular expressions, and submitting forms.