# $Id: Changes,v 1.137 2004/09/16 04:20:07 petdance Exp $
Revision history for Perl extension WWW::Mechanize
1.04 Wed Sep 15 23:27:53 CDT 2004
[ENHANCEMENTS]
* $mech->get() now accepts a WWW::Mechanize::Link object.
* $mech->stack_depth(n) lets you set the depth of the mech
object's page stack. This way, if you have a Mech that does
lots of stuff and never/rarely goes back(), you won't be eating
up memory. Thanks to BooK and Chi-Fung. (RT #5362)
[FIXES]
* Fixed tests that fail under LWP >= 5.800.
* Added a workaround for LWP::UserAgent->clone() when ->{proxy}
is undef. (RT #6443)
* The Referer was getting passed as a URI object sometimes,
and that caused sadness. Eugene Haimov supplied a workaround.
(RT #6372)
[DOCUMENTATION]
* Added Ian Langworth's listmod and John Beppu's photobucket
uploader programs to WWW::Mechanize::Examples.
* Minor doc tweak for find_link()
* Finally added a value() func. Thanks to Spoon,
who even now, months after his passing, is still contributing
to Mechanize.
1.02 Tue Apr 13 22:45:10 CDT 2004
No reason to install if you have 1.00. Fixes are only in tests.
[FIXES]
* t/referer.t didn't cope with spaces in $FindBin::Bin. Plus,
it now forces its URL to localhost.
1.00 Sat Apr 10 00:35:51 CDT 2004
I figure it's about time we hit 1.00, and this version seems
like a good place to do it, because of the potential breakage
described below...
[THINGS THAT WILL BREAK YOUR CODE]
* Header handling has changed. There is no more package variable
%headers that holds all the headers to be added. They are
now added on a per-object basis.
If you were adding a header with add_header(), and the code
relied on that header still being set later on in a later
instance of the class, that code will now break, because the
later instance won't have the header set.
[ENHANCEMENTS]
* You can now prevent a header from being sent by adding it with
an undef value, as in:
$mech->add_header( Referer => undef );
[FIXES]
* Now correctly adds Accept-Encoding to all requests that need it.
[INTERNALS]
* Added new $mech->_modify_request($req) method to do all the
HTTP header modification before the actual request gets
sent off. Subclasses are able to override it if they want.
* Removed the unused Compress::Zlib stuff.
0.76 Wed Apr 7 22:01:43 CDT 2004
[ENHANCEMENTS]
* Added update_html() to let you update the HTML for the page
you're on.
[FIXES]
* Test files account for new Google layout.
[INTERNALS]
* Rearranged the local tests into their own t/local/ directory.
* Made the standalone tests show what server they're hitting.
* Checked that it runs under LWP 5.78.
0.74 Mon Mar 22 23:36:46 CST 2004
[ENHANCEMENTS]
* WWW::Mechanize now sends an Accept-Encoding header of "identity"
to always enforce plaintext responses. Preliminary support for
Compress::Zlib is also there, but is disabled by default.
* Added click_button() and select() methods. The field() method
can now take an arrayref of values, if appropriate. Thanks,
Linda Lee Julien.
* Added url_abs and url_abs_regex parms to find_all_links().
* URLs in META REFRESH tags are now treated as links.
* t/taint.t makes sure that things that should be tainted are.
[FIXES]
* Still more fixes if the machine you're on doesn't have
DNS pointing to it.
* The local changes use localhost as the local host name, instead
of whatever host name that might be on the box, but not in DNS.
Thanks to David Wheeler for letting me play on his box.
* The http_proxy and HTTP_PROXY environment variables get
deleted during the tests that access the dummy local server.
This should let your tests pass, and clear up a lot of RT
tickets.
0.72 Mon Jan 26 21:07:20 CST 2004
[ENHANCEMENTS]
* Added the set_visible() method, thanks to Peter Scott.
[DOCUMENTATION]
* Started the Cookbook at WWW::Mechanize::Cookbook.pod.
[INTERNALS]
* Made the globbing in Makefile.PL a little less command-line
intensive. Also fixed the missing files in MANIFEST.
* Added t/pod-coverage.t for testing POD coverage.
0.71_02 Mon Dec 22 14:29:13 CST 2003
[THINGS THAT MAY BREAK YOUR CODE]
* Added a 5th, optional parameter to WWW::Mechanize::Link's
constructor. In 0.71_01, it was at the beginning of the
argument list and was required. Now it's at the end and is
optional. If, in the 15 hours since 0.71_01 came out, you
went and changed all your WWW::Mechanize::Link constructors,
you'll have to change them around again. Otherwise, you can
just ignore this change.
0.71_01 Sun Dec 21 23:48:12 CST 2003
[THINGS THAT MAY BREAK YOUR CODE]
* WWW::Mechanize::Link's constructor has a new argument
that needs to be passed in, at the start of the argument
list.
[ENHANCEMENTS]
* WWW::Mechanize::Link object now takes a $base URL, and will
return absolute URLs with the url_abs() method. Thanks to
Ashley Pond.
* Added another script to WWW::Mechanize::Examples. It's a
script that didn't make it into Spidering Hacks.
[INSTALL & TESTS]
* Heavy use of the new Test::Memory::Cycle module.
* Fixed Makefile.PL so that the tests are selected under Win32.
* Changed t/mech-dump.t so that the test succeeds under Win32.
* Updated t/referer.t and t/mech-dump.t so they run under VMS.
Thanks to Peter Prymmer.
0.70 Sun Nov 30 23:45:27 CST 2003
[THINGS THAT MAY BREAK YOUR CODE]
* Redirects are now handled better by LWP, so the code that
changes POSTs to GETs on redirects has been removed.
[FIXES]
* Fixed redirect_ok(), which had its API changed out from under
it in LWP 5.76.
[ENHANCEMENTS]
* New warnings in find_link() for strings that are space padded,
and for text matches that are passed a regex. Thanks to
Jim Cromie.
[DOCUMENTATION]
* Patches from Mark Stosberg and Jim Cromie.
[INTERNALS]
* Removed all the checking for Carp. I don't know why I
was thinking that Carp wasn't core. RT #4523.
Also, a big bump in requirements on LWP: We need 5.76.
0.66 Thu Nov 13 14:35:31 CST 2003
No new functionality. Fixed up some install bugs and made a
few documentation tweaks, mostly to plug Spidering Hacks.
0.65 Mon Nov 10 00:11:06 CST 2003
[ENHANCEMENTS]
* Made a _parse_html() method that you can override or call
manually, per request from Gavin Estey.
[FIXES]
* Made some path naming use File::Spec->catfile so that
they work correctly under Windows.
* "make clean" cleans up temp flag files.
[INTERNALS]
* Uses the new Test::Pod 1.00 for simplicity.
0.64 October 23, 2003 11:15pm
[ENHANCEMENTS]
* Many new tests, based on the excellent coverage reporting
created by Paul Johnson's Devel::Cover module.
* The start of JavaScript support, sort of!
If you have an <A> tag that does an onClick that opens a
window, Mech will find the URL from that and make that
be the link for the tag. This is for things like Movable
Type that pop little windows to rebuild indexes.
This is subject to change in the future. I don't know
if it will, but I'm not making promises. It might be so
buggy I just yank the whole thing.
* Big jump in requirements, since we'll soon be using Gisle's
new HTML::Form stuff. Also, older versions of HTML::Form
don't give output I'm expecting.
[FIXES]
* Fixed the t/mech-dump.t failure.
0.63 October 13, 2003 2:56pm
[ENHANCEMENTS]
* mech-dump defaults to dumping forms.
* Added name, name_regex, tag and tag_regex options to find_link()
and follow_link().
* Added tests from Jim Brandt.
0.62 October 7, 2003 8:46pm
[THINGS THAT MIGHT BREAK YOUR CODE]
* The parms for find_link()'s url_regex and text_regex must now
be actual regex objects, as in qr// objects. They can't just
be little text strings. If this is a big bummer, let me know.
[ENHANCEMENTS]
* Added autocheck parm, to tell your Mech object to die on
any error. This saves you from having to check yourself.
This closes RT #3056.
* Renamed the internal _carp() method as warn().
* Added a die() method.
* Can now override the warn() and die() handlers in the
constructor.
* find_link() now complains if it gets a *_regex parm that isn't
actually a regex. See RT #3032.
[FIXES]
* mech-dump.t no longer runs if you're not installing mech-dump.
See RT #3724.
[DOCUMENTATION]
* More FAQs. Thanks to Gavin Estey.
0.61 October 6, 2003 6:30pm
No new functionality here. It's mostly to get the new tests
into the pipeline so the CPAN testers can run 'em.
[FIXES]
* Missing dependency on File::Temp. Thanks, Ask.
[ENHANCEMENTS]
* Added the test case for the form processing problem as a .t
file, since I spent so long getting it down to a simple case.
* Internal code uses accessors instead of direct hash entries.
Prepare for deprecation of existing hash entries!
[DOCUMENTATION]
* The FAQ is now its own document at WWW::Mechanize::FAQ.
0.60 September 22, 2003 10:00pm
[FIXES]
* Changed how t/failure.t tries to fail. It used to hit
a bogus hostname in .com, but with Verisign doing its
SiteFinder crap, even bogus addresses in .com succeed.
[ENHANCEMENTS]
* Added _make_request() to let WWW::Mechanize::Cached easily
hook into the request chain.
0.59 September 3, 2003 11:56pm
[FIXES]
* Squelched a warning in follow() where it tries to do a regex
match against an undef value.
* The page stack functionality, including the back() button,
was entirely broken. Now it works. Thanks to the mighty
Iain Truskett for help.
[ENHANCEMENTS]
* Added the mech-dump script, which replaces mech-forms.
It will dump forms and lists of links. Eventually it will
do lists of images, too, but not yet.
0.58 August 14, 2003 11:30pm
[THINGS THAT MIGHT BREAK YOUR CODE]
* $mech->uri() now returns a plain string, not a URI object.
The automatic stringification of the URI object was
causing problems on Win32 and/or threaded Perls, and I
didn't feel like figuring out why. If the non-objectness
of the uri() method is a problem, let me know.
* form(), form_name() and form_number() now return the
HTML::Form object of the form that was chosen. They used
to return a 1 or 0. This means that if you're explicitly
checking for 1 or 0, instead of evaluating the return
code in a boolean context, your code will break.
[FIXES]
* The <AREA>-handling in extract_links() was incorrectly
building the text.
* uri() now returns a string, not a URI object.
* form(), form_name() and form_number() now return the
HTML::Form object of the form that was chosen.
[INTERNALS]
* Determination of live vs. local tests is now done in
Makefile.PL, and we don't have to set those silly semaphore
files any more.
* Made other cleanups in Makefile.PL, like using
ExtUtils::Command instead of rolling my own touch().
* Moved all the *-live.t tests into t/live/*.t, and renamed
the *-local.t files to not be -local.
* Added more tests for <AREA> tags.
0.57 July 31, 2003 11:21pm
[ENHANCEMENTS]
* Added <AREA HREF=...> tags to those that are links per
find_links().
0.56 July 24, 2003 12:15pm
[THINGS THAT MIGHT BREAK YOUR CODE]
* Created agent_alias() method to do the browser string
translation. Passing "Windows IE 6" to agent() will get
you back exactly that string as the agent. You have to call
$a->agent_alias( "Windows IE 6" ) to get the translation.
Fortunately, unless you used the new functionality of agent() in
the past two days since I released 0.55, it won't be a problem.
[ENHANCEMENTS]
* Removed the dependencies on Carp and Test::Builder. There still
is a dependency on Test::Builder for Test::More, but it's no
longer explicit in the Makefile.PL. Mech will use Carp if
possible, but it's no longer a requirement.
[INTERNALS]
* Added _carp method for handling conditional warnings, rather
than checking quiet() all the time.
0.55 July 22, 2003 12:10pm
[ENHANCEMENTS]
* Added WWW::Mechanize::Link object to encapsulate what used to
be an array reference of stuff from find_link(). This replaces
having to know that $link->[0] was URL and so on. However,
since WWW::Mechanize::Link is a blessed arrayref, it's backwards
compatible with existing code.
* The WWW::Mechanize::Link object now tracks what tag the link
came from (<A>, <FRAME> or <IFRAME>).
* No longer loads Carp unless and until it's necessary.
* submit_form() now uses the currently specified form if a
form_name or form_number parm is not specified. (RT #2768)
* Added a translate table of handy browser strings that the
agent() method recognizes. These strings may be one of the
following:
* Windows IE 6
* Windows Mozilla
* Mac Safari
* Mac Mozilla
* Linux Mozilla
* Linux Konqueror
For example, "Windows IE 6" gets replaced with
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)".
Thanks to Ed Silva for the list.
[DOCUMENTATION]
* Moved the deprecated methods to their own section.
* Removed the TODO list, since it's all in RT.
0.54 July 20, 2003 12:47am
[THINGS THAT MIGHT BREAK YOUR CODE]
* See the enhancements on extract_links() and failures.
Also, see the note about #2811 below.
[ENHANCEMENTS]
* find_all_links() and find_link() can specify multiple
text or url parameters, which will be anded together.
Before, there was a pecking order in which parm took
precedence, and any extras were ignored. To find the
first link with text of "news" and with "cnn.com" in the
URL, use:
$a->find_link( text => "news", url_regex => qr/cnn\.com/ );
Thanks to Greg Davies for the idea. (RT #2973)
* extract_links() is now an internal-only method, named
_extract_links(). If you're using it, don't. Use
find_all_links() instead, which is more flexible.
* Now, when there is a failure of some kind, certain fields
like title, forms and links are cleared out. Before, you'd
have leftover links from the previous page. I suspect that
at least one person out there has been mistakenly relying
on this behavior, and his code will now break, but that's
a good thing. See t/failure.t for more.
[FIXES]
* No longer tries to tech mech-forms if you're not installing
it.
* Fixed #2811: The definition of the link text contents
did not match the documentation.
[DOCUMENTATION]
* Added a sample CPAN search from Ed Silva.
* Added link to the Perl Advent Calendar.
0.53 July 16, 2003
This version ONLY fixes some test-file problems. There are no
functionality enhancements or bug fixes in WWW::Mechanize itself.
[FIXES]
* Explicitly stringifies URI::file objects in the *.t files,
in hopes of getting the thread bummers fixed. See RT
#2874 and #2880.
0.52 July 7, 2003
[ENHANCEMENTS]
* mech-forms now handles local files.
* Added t/mech-forms.t to test the app
* Added some parm-checking to submit_form()
* All the warns are now carps. Thanks to MJD for pointing
it out during his "Tricks Of The Wizards" talk.
[FIXES]
* Bumped up the Test::Builder requirement to 0.17, which
I hope will get rid of the thread problems with t/tick.t.
Thanks to Autrijus Tang for pointing out the note in
Builder.pm.
0.51 June 29, 2003
[ENHANCEMENTS]
* Added the "mech-forms" command to list all the forms on
a given page.
[FIXES]
* Made the tick.t test not rely on 2shortplanks.com.
0.50 June 24, 2003
[ENHANCEMENTS]
* Mech now does what most browsers do when they handle a
redirect: It changes the POST to a GET. This doesn't match the
RFC, but it's what browsers do. Thanks to Stuart Children.
0.49 June 23, 2003
[FIXES]
* Added a fix a while ago that tracks redirect history. That fix
had the bad side effect of always allowing a redirect.
That has now been fixed.
0.48 June 22, 2003
[ENHANCEMENTS]
* Added find_all_links() as the counterpart to find_link().
[FIXES]
* get() wasn't passing through its parms to LWP::UserAgent::get(),
so you couldn't use the :content_file parm. Now it
behaves like a good little subclass.
0.47 June 21, 2003
[ENHANCEMENTS]
* find_link() now lets you pass n=>"all" to get back a list
of all links that match the other criteria. NOTE: Outdated! See
v0.48 for the preferred way.
* find_link() and follow_link() now complain if you pass
invalid parms to them.
[FIXES]
* Tracks URI history properly after redirects.
0.46 June 20, 2003
[ENHANCEMENTS]
* Added tick() and untick() functions for handling checkboxes.
Thanks to Mark Fowler for this patch.
* The uri() will only be the URI of the requested page if it worked.
* Oh yes, I forgot to mention: We're on Sourceforge now.
0.45 June 11, 2003
[ENHANCEMENTS]
* Added response() method, which is identical to res().
* Added a convenience method success(), which is just a wrapper
around $agent->res->is_success().
* Passes along a Referer: header. It can still be overridden
with the %Headers hash, though. Thanks, Corion.
* We now have a set of localized tests that run for machines that
aren't connected to the Net. There's now a t/lib/ directory for
those helper files, and the previous Utils.pm has been dropped.
Again, Corion to the rescue.
[DOCUMENTATION]
* Added to the FAQ
* Rearranged all the functions in the file so they are now
logically grouped.
0.44 June 5, 2003
[ENHANCEMENTS]
* Now follows redirects after a POST. By default, LWP::UserAgent
does NOT follow redirects after a POST. This matches the
official RFC. However, since WWW::Mechanize is meant to be a
browser clone, and browsers follow the redirects after a POST,
I've changed this behavior. If this causes bummers, let me
know and maybe I'll throw in a switch.
[DOCUMENTATION]
* The package now includes the WWW::Mechanize logo in the etc/
directory. I have no idea what I'll do with it, but thanks
to Mengwong for making it!
0.43 May 29, 2003
[ENHANCEMENTS]
* Now uses request() instead of send_request(). This should
solve all of our redirection and cookie bummers.
* Added reload() method. Thanks, Corion.
0.42 May 26, 2003
[ENHANCEMENTS]
* Renamed _do_request() to send_request(), so it's now a
proper overload of LWP::UserAgent. Thanks to Philippe Bruhat.
Recorded in RT ticket #1708.
* Removed the req() method, and tests that used it.
* extract_links() now checks for <IFRAME> tags along with the
existing <A> and <FRAME>.
* Now explicitly requires HTML::HeadParser.
* Doesn't load Carp unless it's actually needed.
0.41 May 22, 2003
[ENHANCEMENTS]
* There are no enhancements in functionality.
* Testing suite getting more network-independent.
[DOCUMENTATION]
* Started a FAQ section.
* New SYNOPSIS section. Thanks to Uri Guttmann.
* Documentation fixes. Thanks to Mark Stosberg, Mike Fragassi.
0.40 April 18, 2003
[ENHANCEMENTS]
* Three new methods.
* find_link() for finding a specified link
* follow_link() for following a specified link
* submit_form() for all-in-one form submission.
All three owe a great deal to Uri Guttmann. Thanks, Uri!
* Split out the examples into WWW::Mechanize::Examples.pod
* Added t/back.t
* Documentation fixes from Abigail
0.39 April 1, 2003
[ENHANCEMENTS]
* No functional enhancements. Everything is docs.
* Added a new example from Dan Rinzel, for posting to Movable Type
* Started playing with having the test suite not have to have
live net access.
0.38 March 24, 2003
[DEPRECATIONS]
* The %WWW::Mechanize::Headers hash is officially deprecated.
It will be removed pretty soon. I'm not sure what the
replacement will be, but it won't be a package-level hash.
[ENHANCEMENTS]
* The submit() method is no longer an alias for click("submit"),
because some forms don't have a button called "submit".
In fact, some may not have any buttons at all if they're
JavaScript-controlled.
[FIXES]
* RT #2056: $agent->field() wasn't returning proper input field,
because of an incorrect call to the underlying HTML::Form.
Thanks to Prakash Kailasa.
0.37 March 4, 2003
[ENHANCEMENTS]
* Added an is_html() method
* Added a title() method
* No longer requires the Clone module.
* No longer requires the Test::Pod module, although it's nice
to have.
0.36 February 4, 2003
[ENHANCEMENTS]
* Added form lookup by name. Thanks to Jan Ivar Pladsen and
Iain Truskett for their patches.
* Added new functions form_name() and form_number(). Existing
form() function calls each of these as appropriate.
* Explicitly requires LWP 5.69 because of the form naming.
* Added new POD section "Examples" for user-submitted sample code
of how to use WWW::Mechanize.
* Quieted the warnings in the test suite, so that you don't get
expected, but disconcerting, warnings to the screen.
0.35 January 22, 2003
[ENHANCEMENTS]
* Now creates an internal cookie_jar by default.
* Beefing up the test suite
* Don't forget, direct access to internal members is deprecated.
Use the accessors starting now.
0.33 January 15, 2003
[ENHANCEMENTS]
* Added accessor methods
* Deprecated the direct accessing of object contents. You can
no longer rely on the names of any of the hash elements.
* Added a quiet() method to suppress warnings to the screen.
[FIXES]
* More documentation fixes. (Thanks to Briac Pilpré)
0.32 September 23, 2002
[FIXES]
* Now correctly calls the LWP::UserAgent constructor. (Thanks to
Philippe "BooK" Bruhat)
* Fixed doc on what get() method returns. (Again thanks to BooK)
* Now uses http://www.google.com/intl/en/ as the basis for
testing, since non-US users apparently get redirected to
country-specific sites when they hit http://www.google.com/
0.31 September 13, 2002
[ENHANCEMENTS]
* get() now returns the HTTP::Response object.
* Prepended push_page_stack(), pop_page_stack() and
do_request() with underscores, to emphasize that they
are for internal use only.
0.30 September 10, 2002
[ENHANCEMENTS]
* Fixed the stack popping problem.
[FIXES]
* Put all the inline tests into t/*.t
* get() doesn't work w/relative URLs
http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/Bug.html?id=1492
* The arrays returned by extract_links()
now have a third element, which contains
the name attribute of the link (undef
if the link has no name attribute).
Code before this point is forked off from WWW::Automate 0.20b.