Perl: Open a file from a URL - perl

Question

I wanted to know how to open a file from a URL rather than a local file and I found the following answer on another thread:
use IO::String;
my $handle = IO::String->new(get("google.com"));
my #lines = <$handle>;
close $handle;
This works perfectly... on my PC...
But when I transferred the code over to my hosted server it complains that it can't find the IO module. So is there another way to open a file from an URL, that doesn't require any external modules (or uses one that is pretty much installed on every server)...?

Answer 1

You can install PerlIO::http, which will give you an input layer for opening a filehandle from a URL via open. This thing is not included in the Perl core, but it will work with Perls as early as 5.8.9.
Once you've installed it, all you need to do is open with a layer :http in the mode argument. There is nothing to use here. That happens automatically.
open my $fh, '<:http', 'https://metacpan.org/recent';
You can then read from $fh like a regular file. Under the hood it will take care of getting the data over the wire.
while (my $line = <$fh>) { ... }

Answer 2

There is no way to "open a file from a URL" as you ask. Well, I suppose you could throw something together using the progress() callback from LWP::UserAgent, but even then I don't think it would work how you want it to.
But you can make something that looks like it's doing what you want pretty easily. Actually, what we're really doing is pulling all the data back from the URL and then opening a filehandle on a string that contains that data.
use LWP::Simple;
my $data = get('https://google.com');
open my $url_fh, '<', \$data or die $!;
# Now $url_fh is a filehandle wrapped around your data.
# Treat it like any other filehandle.
while (<$url_fh>) {
print;
}
Your problem was that IO::String wasn't installed. But there's no need to install it, as it's simple enough to do what it does with standard Perl features (simply open a filehandle on a reference to a string).
Update: IO::String is completely unnecessary here. Not only because you can do what it does very simply, by just opening a filehandle on a reference to your string, but also because all you want to do is to read a file from a web site into an array. And in that case, your code is simply:
use LWP::Simple;
my $url = 'something';
my #records = split /\n/, get($url);
You might even consider adding some error handing.
use LWP::Simple;
my $url = 'something';
my $data = get($url);
die "No data found\n" unless defined $data;
my #array = split /\n/, get($url);