what is better ?

Otis Gospodnetic (otisg@panther.middlebury.edu)
Tue, 23 Jul 1996 17:48:16 -0400 (EDT) 

Hello,

I'm wondering what is a better way to check the validity of the URL (and
report the response in case of error):

1)

use LWP::UserAgent;
use URI::URL;
use HTTP::Headers;
use HTTP::Request;

$ua = new LWP::UserAgent;
$header = new HTTP::Headers
    'Date'      =>      HTTP::Date::time2str(time),     # Convert machine time
                                                        # to a format suitable
                                                        # for the HTTP server
    'Accept'    =>      'text/html',            # Tell the server we can
                                                # accept HTML
    'Accept'    =>      'text/plain',           # Tell the server we can
                                                # accept plain text (.txtfiles)
    ;

$url = new URI::URL("$link");
$request = new HTTP::Request('GET', $url, $header);
$response = $ua->request($request);

if ($response->is_success) {
    print $response->content;   # Prints the HTML
} else {
    print $response->error_as_HTML;       # Prints the error as HTML
}
__END__

OR

2)

use LWP::UserAgent;

    $ua = new LWP::UserAgent;
    $ua->agent("SomeName/1.0");

    $req = new HTTP::Request 'GET', "$URL";
    $req->header('Accept' => 'text/html');

    # send request
    $res = $ua->request($req);

    # check the outcome
    if ($res->is_success) {
        return 1;
    } else {
	########## what do I print here to get spit the err to the browser?
    }
__END__


Thanks !

Otis