Perl query posting script

I have been sending simple queries over the internet to various database servers using coding like:

use IO::Socket;
$query = "/htbin-post/Entrez/query?db=m&form=4&term=$word1&$word2"."[all]"."&dopt=b&dispmax=50&tool=IGM&save=m";
$EOL = "\015\012";
$BLANK = $EOL x 2;
$remote = IO::Socket::INET->new(Proto => "tcp",
PeerAddr => "www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov",
PeerPort => "http(80)",
);
unless ($remote) { die "cannot connect to http daemon on host" }
$remote->autoflush(1);
print $remote "GET $query HTTP/1.0" . "$BLANK";

Such scripting doesn't work for sites expecting form encoded querying. I capture query sessions through my port to see what is bing sent but don't know how to use the information in my scripts. An example is:
Send 350 bytes on stream 24.
POST /tigr-scripts/magic/r4.pl HTTP/1.1
Host: pga.tigr.org
Accept: */*
Accept-Language: en
Connection: Keep-Alive
Referer: URL
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Mac_PowerPC)
UA-OS: MacOS
UA-CPU: PPC
Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Extension: Security/Remote-Passphrase

Send 207 bytes on stream 24.
Content-length: 184

species=1&gblist=AA409614+AA409620+AA409627&Get+TC=Get+TC&.cgifields=species

Receive 162 bytes on stream 24.
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
.
.
.
Can anyone tell me how to script such a query, i want to take the resulting page and parse information out of it into report tables.
thanks,
tom

This should probably be moved to the perl forum. . .

Anything having to do with posting data to / getting data from the web is best done with LWP and the LWP suite of modules like LWP::Simple, LWP::UserAgent. It's quite stunning what you can do with these modules when you dig into them.

Do a google search for lwpcook (or if you have perl 5.6 .x and are on a *nix system, type "man lwpcook" or "perldoc lwpcook"), the excellent intro to using LWP.

Doing this with IO::Socket is MUCH more difficult than using LWP, because LWP will take care of a lot of the lower-level stuff for you.