Re: Website thinks Mech is MSIE < 4.0

[Joseph Alotta]

Gedanken,
Thanks for helping me.  I was looking at the docs for Mechanize and the 
default behavior is to accept cookies. Shouldn't Mechanize have taken 
the cookie when it was set?

I searched on Google and CPAN and I couldn't find a good example of how 
to set a cookie manually.  I was thinking I need to use the 
HTTP::Cookie module, but that only saves cookies
not how to add one.  Besides, I couldn't find AnalysisUserID in the 
html code.  Could you please help me on this a little more.  I am not a 
perl wizard.

Joe.
On Aug 25, 2004, at 11:53 AM, Gedanken wrote:
On Wed, 25 Aug 2004, Gedanken wrote:
i just took a quick look.
after the initial 302 redirect, they are setting a cookie called
AnalysisUserID.  i would suspect that is failing.  id look at the
javascript code that generates that cookie, duplicate it yourself, and
manually 'give' yourself that cookie.
 On Wed, 25 Aug 2004, Joseph Alotta wrote:
 my first guess without seeing the sites html code would be that you 
are
 correctly sending the user-agent info, but one of 2 things is wrong:

  - you are missing a Host header in the request so i thinks you arent
 httpd 1.1 compliant
  - some kind of javascript is executing to try and set a cookie and 
its
 failing.  i have seen many sites have some 'jscript=1' cookie to 
ensure
 the client can handle their stuff.  in this case, manually creating 
the
 cookie and adding it to the cookie jar tricks the site into accepting 
you.

  Greetings,
  I am trying to use WWW::Mechanize to get my account data.  First 
thing
  is
  that the website tells me "Sorry you need Internet Explorer 4.O or
  greater".

  I think I have done everything to set it to be IE 6.O (Also 5.5).  
What
  am
  I doing wrong?

  Thank you,
  Joe.


  #!/usr/bin/perl
  # americanfunds - gets account info from american funds 401k website
  #
  use strict;
  use warnings;
  use WWW::Mechanize;
  use HTML::TreeBuilder;
  use HTML::TableExtract;
  use Data::Dumper;
  $Data::Dumper::Terse = 1;
  my $User_agent_id = 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98)';
  my $m = WWW::Mechanize->new( autocheck => 1);
  $m->agent_alias( 'Windows IE 6' );
  #$m->agent($User_agent_id);
  main('12345678', '123456');
  sub main
  {
       my ($id, $pass) = @_;
       $m->get('http://www.americanfunds.com/retire'),
           or die "can't get initial americanfunds.com/retire screen";
       my $str = $m->content; print "1. $str\n";
       $m->follow_link(n => 1 )
           or die "can't get login screen";
       $str = $m->content; print "2. $str\n";
       exit;
  }

--
gedanken