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Help sending/getting Feedback from FedEx via Perl Script 2

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DR4296

DR4296

Technical User
Jan 4, 2001
3
US
Greetings All!

I've been setting up a Perl shopping cart for a friend of mine who just opened his own retail store.

My friend wants to use FedEx as a shipper... nobody else.

I checked out FedEx's site and found that most of the API's require a Windows hosting platform. Well, I've got his site out on Unix, of course.

The only other option FedEx offers is that you can call a particular URL, with parameters added on, in order to look up rate quotes, delivery times, tracking, etc. Here's a sample:



This URL triggers an executable over on FedEx's servers and kicks back a web-page that looks like this:


<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC &quot;-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Frameset//EN&quot; &quot;<HTML>
<!--#nossi-->
<HEAD>
<TITLE>FedEx Ground Rate Calculation Reply</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY BGCOLOR=&quot;#FFFFFF&quot; LINK=&quot;#DE5208&quot; VLINK=&quot;#9425E6&quot; ALINK=&quot;#000000&quot;>
<font size=&quot;5&quot; face=&quot;arial, courier new&quot;>
<i><b>FedEx Ground Rate Calculation</b></i>
</font>
<font size=&quot;-1&quot; face=&quot;arial, courier new&quot;>
<!-- Begin Reply Message -->
<table border=&quot;0&quot; cellpadding=&quot;0&quot; cellspacing=&quot;5&quot; width=&quot;440&quot;>
<TR><TD ALIGN=&quot;LEFT&quot; VALIGN=&quot;TOP&quot; COLSPAN=&quot;4&quot;>
<!Service>U.S. Domestic FedEx Ground Package<!/Service>
<!Origin>44429<!/Origin>
<!Destination>64050<!/Destination>
<!Zone>5<!/Zone>
<!TransitTime>3<!/TransitTime>
<!Weight>50<!/Weight>
<!BillWeight>50<!/BillWeight>
<!WeightUnit>LBS<!/WeightUnit>
<!BaseRate>15.47<!/BaseRate>
<!TotalCharges>15.47<!/TotalCharges>
</TD></TR>
</table>
<!-- End Reply Message -->
</font>
</BODY>
</HTML>


What I'd like to know is... (and I'll admit that I'm not a formally-trained Perl programmer... I just learned by tinkering)....:

1) I know I can &quot;build&quot; the request URL with the proper parameters from the cart, but how can I &quot;call&quot; the URL from within the cart/Perl script itself ?

2) And, can I somehow &quot;capture&quot; the response sent from the FedEx servers/exe... sort through the output... and just &quot;take out&quot; the info from the necessary fields that I need (rate quotes mostly), so as to plug them into the HTML output of the shopping cart properly ??

Thanks !

-= Dave Raasch =-
Independence, MO
 
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i think you can do all that quite easily with the LWP module but as i haven't used that before and am in a bit of a rush i'm afraid i can't help more than that
(you can get the lwp module from )

good luck
 
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Here is a short version of retrieving a web page usin LWP::Simple. You would want to build your cart/item specific URL to get.

Code: 
#!/usr/local/bin/perl
use LWP::Simple;
$url='[URL unfurl="true"]http://grd.fedex.com/cgi-bin/rrr2010.exe?func=Rate&amp;;Screen=Ground[/URL]
    &amp;OriginZip=44429&amp;OriginCountryCode=US&amp;DestZip=64050&amp;DestCountryCode=US
    &amp;Weight=50';

# pull the HTML of the requested page into $content
$content = get($url);

# print that content to your browser
print &quot;Content-type: text/html\n\n&quot;;
print &quot;$content&quot;;


With the page pulled into $content, you can pattern match the items you want to catch.
If you want to catch <!TotalCharges>15.47<!/TotalCharges>,

Code: 
# looking for <!TotalCharges>some_digits dot some_digits<
# catching &quot;some_digits dot some_digits&quot;, (\d+\.\d+), in parens puts them in $1
$content =~ /<!TotalCharges>(\d+\.\d+)</s;
$shipping_cost = $1; # the portion of the match in parens.

I have not run this, but it should be pretty close to functional.

'hope this helps.....




keep the rudder amid ship and beware the odd typo
 
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That XML in there is your savior. That makes it very easy to parse out like goBoating suggested.
Sincerely,

Tom Anderson
CEO, Order amid Chaos, Inc.
 
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A thousand thanks to you all !

Thanks to frequent checking on this board, I discovered &quot;aljc's&quot; post on the LWP module early.

I'd been experimenting with it, using Google to lookup possible examples when I had problems. The only problem I had left was... I have a tendency to get stuck on the pattern-matching stuff.... what character-combos mean what.

So, coming back here and finding &quot;GoBoating&quot;'s post was like finding the last piece of the puzzle !!

Thanks !

You shortened my work-time considerably and have introduced me to a powerful, fun function !

P.S. By the way, I also ended up over at CPAN and discovered modules there for UPS and Fed Ex shipping. However, the FedEx one there uses FedEx's more-advanced API interface. It requires another module... and when I tried to install that module, I didn't have enough permissions on my web-server. So I gave up and went back to the above method.

THANK YOU !!!!!!!!!
 
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