| Subject: | redirect POST->GET should remove content |
Using: Perl v5.8.0 on Debian GNU/Linux (kernel 2.4.20).
In version 0.50 and later, Mech was updated to "do what most browsers do when they handle a redirect: It changes the POST to a GET". However, it was not updated to also remove the POSTed content from the request. Attached is a patch that does this.
I am working on a robot to interface to yahoo's briefcase (to upload files, etc.) and I found a couple places where it does a redirect after a POST and expects the browser to do a GET with *no content*. I got an error message from LWP that "peer prematurely closed connection" (or something link that) because the server closed the connection right after the GET request headers were received and before the content was sent. Therefore, I think it is the right thing to do to remove the content.
For precedence, I did a little research on the internet and found an article where someone described this particular behavior of browsers:
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=POST+GET+redirect+content&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=7infrd%24hm6%40netline.jpl.nasa.gov&rnum=7
And I also found some more in-depth discussion of the issue:
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/www/post-redirect.html
Thank you very much for writing such a great module and keeping it up to date. It has made it much easier to write this robot.
Let me know if you need me to do anything else to help solve this issue.
--- Mechanize.orig.pm 2003-07-24 17:24:05.000000000 +0000
+++ Mechanize.pm 2003-07-27 23:04:49.000000000 +0000
@@ -950,8 +950,13 @@
if ( $ok ) {
$self->{redirected_uri} = $prospective_request->uri;
- # Mimic erroneous browser behaviour by changing the method.
- $prospective_request->method("GET") if $prospective_request->method eq "POST";
+ if ( $prospective_request->method eq "POST" ) {
+ # Mimic erroneous browser behaviour by changing the method
+ # and removing content.
+ $prospective_request->method("GET");
+ $prospective_request->content("");
+ $prospective_request->remove_header("Content-Length");
+ }
}
return $ok;