Perl “HTTP::cookies”“ with ”LWP::UserAgent“ error: ”does not look like a Netscape cookies file"

Question

I'm trying to do the equivalent of curl --cookie cookies.txt "https://foo.example.org/bar" in a Perl script. I have a cookies file that I believe is in Netscape format (tab delimited) that works fine with curl . HTTP::cookies complains:

cookies.txt does not look like a Netscape cookies file at /System/Library/Perl/Extras/5.10.0/HTTP/Cookies/netscape.pm line 21, line 1.

My script is just a stub for testing:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use LWP::UserAgent;
my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
use HTTP::Cookies::Netscape;
my $cookie_jar = HTTP::Cookies::Netscape->new
                  ( 'file' => 'cookies.txt', );  
my $url = 'http://www.google.com/';
my $response = $ua->get( $url );
print "Return: $response->status_line\n";

The cookies.txt file actually starts with a comment:

# This content may be pasted into a cookies.txt file and used by wget

But I tried deleting the comment and got the same exact error. The cookies.txt file has Unix style line endings.

Answer 1

Arg!

Turns out that, while curl is happy with the file, the HTTP::Cookes::Netscape module wants the first line to be

# Netscape HTTP Cookie File

I added that, and now it seems happy.

(I found the module source code and searched for the error message.)