NAME

HTTP::Message - HTTP style message base class

SYNOPSIS

 package HTTP::Request;  # or HTTP::Response
 require HTTP::Message;
 @ISA=qw(HTTP::Message);

DESCRIPTION

An HTTP::Message object contains some headers and a content body. The class is abstract, i.e. it only used as a base class for HTTP::Request and HTTP::Response and should never instantiated as itself. The following methods are available:

$mess->content

$mess->content( $content )

The content() method sets the content if an argument is given. If no argument is given the content is not touched. In either case the previous content is returned.

Note that the content should be a string of bytes. Strings in perl can contain characters outside the range of a byte. The Encode module can be used to turn such strings into a string of bytes.

$mess->add_content( $data )

The add_content() methods appends more data to the end of the current content buffer.

$mess->content_ref

The content_ref() method will return a reference to content buffer string. It can be more efficient to access the content this way if the content is huge, and it can even be used for direct manipulation of the content, for instance:

  ${$res->content_ref} =~ s/\bfoo\b/bar/g;

This example would modify the content buffer in-place.

$mess->headers

Returns the embedded HTTP::Headers object.

$mess->headers_as_string

$mess->headers_as_string( $endl )

Call the as_string() method for the headers in the message. This will be the same as

    $mess->headers->as_string

but it will make your program a whole character shorter :-)

$mess->protocol

$mess->protocol( $proto )

Sets the HTTP protocol used for the message. The protocol() is a string like HTTP/1.0 or HTTP/1.1.

$mess->clone

Returns a copy of the message object.

All methods unknown to HTTP::Message itself are delegated to the HTTP::Headers object that is part of every message. This allows convenient access to these methods. Refer to HTTP::Headers for details of these methods:

    $mess->header( $field => $val )
    $mess->push_header( $field => $val )
    $mess->init_header( $field => $val )
    $mess->remove_header( $field )
    $mess->scan( \&doit )

    $mess->date
    $mess->expires
    $mess->if_modified_since
    $mess->if_unmodified_since
    $mess->last_modified
    $mess->content_type
    $mess->content_encoding
    $mess->content_length
    $mess->content_language
    $mess->title
    $mess->user_agent
    $mess->server
    $mess->from
    $mess->referer
    $mess->www_authenticate
    $mess->authorization
    $mess->proxy_authorization
    $mess->authorization_basic
    $mess->proxy_authorization_basic

COPYRIGHT

Copyright 1995-2001 Gisle Aas.

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.