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Perl For WWW

The document discusses how Perl can be used to automate web testing. It describes several Perl modules that are useful for testing, including LWP for retrieving web pages, WWW::Mechanize for interacting with pages, and Test::More for creating test plans and evaluating results. The author uses these modules to build scripts that can automatically test a website with hundreds of pages for various conditions in just minutes, rather than having to manually test for hours. Examples are provided to illustrate retrieving a page, checking elements and links, and evaluating test results.

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Rahul Choure
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29 views

Perl For WWW

The document discusses how Perl can be used to automate web testing. It describes several Perl modules that are useful for testing, including LWP for retrieving web pages, WWW::Mechanize for interacting with pages, and Test::More for creating test plans and evaluating results. The author uses these modules to build scripts that can automatically test a website with hundreds of pages for various conditions in just minutes, rather than having to manually test for hours. Examples are provided to illustrate retrieving a page, checking elements and links, and evaluating test results.

Uploaded by

Rahul Choure
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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If you are a software tester or Quality Assurance Engineer testing any sort of product with a web

interface and you aren’t using Perl to automate your testing, you are missing out. Perl is a simple,
fast, powerful scripting language that has a ton of free modules available to ease your job as a
tester.
I use it everyday. Working for a top 50 web company, I’m responsible for testing a website with
several hundred pages and several hundred partner sites with their own layouts, color schemes,
logos, links, etc. Doing all this testing manually is simply not an option. A simple change such as
updating a logo on all sites can take several hours to test manually by hand. Using an automated
script, I can perform this amount of testing in about one minute.
Let me tell you about my Perl toolkit, what packages I use, how I use them, and what they can
offer you.
1. LWP – LWP is Perl’s interface to the World Wide Web. It provides the tools you need,
exposed through a variety of simple through complex interfaces, to test web sites.
LWP::Simple allows the user to grab the content of any webpage with one line of code.
$content = get('http://www.distinctquality.com/blog')
Will take the HTML returned from this blog and put it into the $content variable.
LWP::UserAgent allows you more detailed access to the LWP library. I use it to set
UserAgents and modify HTTP headers before retrieving a web page. By changing the
user agent, I can tell a website that my request is coming from a Blackberry device, a
Firefox browser, an Internet Explorer 7 browser, a Treo, or a Motorola RAZR. If your
product needs to serve different content based on the browser type, LWP::UserAgent is
going to become your best friend.
2. WWW::Mechanize – WWW::Mechanize allows me, through a few simple lines of code
to check all the links on the page, check image properties, check attributes of objects, and
populate forms for testing form submissions. I can build a quick script to grab every link
on a page, fetch the URL, and verify the response is a success code. If I point this type of
script at a thorough site map, I can quickly test the majority of my site’s pages in the
blink of an eye. For adaptive regression testing, this is a invaluable tool.
3. Test::More – Test::More will be the foundation of your test scripts. It allows you to
quickly build a test “plan” for each script with the number of test cases and each test
being evaluated as pass/fail. Its simple, but it supports test suites, allowing you to run a
series of test scripts with a nice report at the end showing pass fail statistics and a list of
which tests failed. Test::More allows you to run your tests in a simple manner by
evaluating any statement to see if it is true or false.
($string) = ($content =~ /\<title\>(.*)\<\/title\>/);
ok($string =~ /.+/, “Check for title”);
This test will pass if $string contains anything between the title tags. This would allow
you to quickly test for non-null titles on all of your pages.
Test Automation with Perl is a snap. If you haven’t used it yet, I encourage you to pick up a book
on the subject or take a class at your local community college. Learning the basic syntax is a
breeze and you’ll be automating large amounts of tests in no time! If you have used perl for test
automation and know of other perl modules that are a great help in automating tests, please leave
a comment to share with the rest of the readers!
====== Addendum 2/11/2008 ======
Kirk Brown over at About.com wrote a quick review about this blog post on
http://perl.about.com. He mentioned it needed more good examples, so I’ve put together a
*slightly* more advanced example using LWP::Simple and Test::More together to do some
really basic web testing.

Here is the script:


------------------------------
#!/usr/bin/perl

use Test::More;
use LWP::Simple;
use strict;

plan tests => 4; # Tell Test::More that I'm planning 4 tests

# The URL I plan to test


my $url = 'http://www.msn.com';

# Uses LWP::Simple to 'get' the page content from the url


my $content = get($url); # gets HTML source via LWP::Simple

# LWP::Simple returns undefined if the request fails,


# lets test for success
ok(defined($content), "Get worked on $url");

# Lets check for the year being correct on the page by


# running a regex on the new $content variable
my ($msn_date) = ($content =~ /id="dl"\>.*?, .*? \d+, (\d+?)\<\/a\>/);

# Then we'll take the output of the regex from the page and
# make sure the year is right. If the test fails here, we may
# want input as to why it failed so we'll add a diag line if
# the test fails
ok($msn_date == 2008, "Date shows 2008")
|| diag "Date test failed, value was $msn_date";

# Lets make sure the Privacy link is there, legal usually gets
# upset if it is missing
ok($content =~ /\MSN Privacy\<\/a\>/, "Privacy Policy link exists");

# Then we'll run a quick test that we'll know the


# media folks will require
ok($content =~ /Britney Spears/, "Page contains Britney Spears story");
——————————
Here is the output:
——————————
> perl msntest.t
1..4
ok 1 – Get worked on http://www.msn.com
ok 2 – Date shows 2008
ok 3 – Page contains link to MSN Privacy Policy
not ok 4 – Page contains requisite Britney Spears story
# Failed test ‘Page contains requisite Britney Spears story’
# at msntest.t line 29.
# Looks like you failed 1 test of 4.
——————————
As you can see, its a simple script, but I hope it will give you some hints as to how you may want
to go about using Perl to test for conditions in your own web pages.

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