Chapter 12. Downloading Web Pages Through a Proxy Server

—Rob Svirskas

The previous article presented five simple but elegant programs that download information from various web services: stock quotes, weather predictions, currency information, U.S. postal address correction, and CNN headline news. If you’re like me, your company uses a firewall to repel wily hackers, which means that we have to use a proxy server to access most URLs. A proxy server (sometimes called a “gateway”) is simply an intermediary computer that sends your request to a server and returns its response to you. The bad news: if you try to use the LWP::Simple get function without first letting it know about your proxy server, it returns nothing at all.