A general purpose programming library for
WWW applications in
Perl.
Originally created by Roy Fielding for his MOMspider link checking robot, which was written in Perl 4. Martijn Koster and Gisle Aas, the current maintainer, rewrote it in Perl 5; this incarnation is known under the abbreviation LWP.
Today, LWP is a bundle of CPAN modules that is prerequisite for most of the Web software written in Perl.
It includes support for several network protocols at the client side (HTTP, Gopher, FTP, local files), and fairly extensive server-side HTTP support.
Extensive support for URI manipulation is included.
A set of HTML handling libraries, with heuristics-based parsing for 'real-world' HTML, is also part of the LWP bundle.