This is how you can dynamically set a custom HTTP User-Agent for your Perl requests to fake a device or browser for testing purpose or getting a device-specific version of a website.WWW::Mechanize supports setting a custom user-agent with the constructor and after this gives a choice of 6 pre-defined basic user-agents ( $mech->agent_alias() ), only.
The following code demonstrates how to dynamically change the user-agent on a Mechanize object.
use WWW::Mechanize;
my $initial_user_agent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.2; de-de; HTC Desire HD 1.18.161.2 Build/FRF91) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1';
my @user_agents = (
'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; nl; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101203 Firefox/3.6.13',
'Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/7D11',
'Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5',
);
# Set an initial custom header with the contructor
my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new( agent => $initial_user_agent );
# get a page and print current URI (WWW::Mechanize follows redirections)
$mech->get( 'http://www.facebook.com' );
print sprintf( "User-Agent %s\n redirects to: %s\n\n", $initial_user_agent, $mech->uri() );
foreach my $http_user_agent (@user_agents) {
# dynamically set custom HTTP User-agents
$mech->add_header( 'User-agent' => $http_user_agent);
$mech->get( 'http://www.facebook.com' );
print sprintf( "User-Agent %s\n redirects to: %s\n\n", $http_user_agent, $mech->uri() );
}
# $ perl ./mechanize-user-agent.pl
# User-Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.2; de-de; HTC Desire HD 1.18.161.2 Build/FRF91) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1
# redirects to: http://m.facebook.com/?w2m&refsrc=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2F&_rdr
#
# User-Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; nl; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101203 Firefox/3.6.13
# redirects to: http://www.facebook.com
#
# User-Agent Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/7D11
# redirects to: http://m.facebook.com/?w2m&refsrc=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2F&_rdr
#
# User-Agent Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5
# redirects to: http://m.facebook.com/?w2m&refsrc=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2F&_rdr
