P5-expect-simple

Wrapper around the Expect module

ExpectSimple is a wrapper around the Expect module which should suffice for simple applications. It hides most of the Expect machinery; the Expect object is available for tweaking if need be.

Generally, one starts by creating an ExpectSimple object using new. This will start up the target program, and will wait until one of the specified prompts is output by the target. At that point the caller should send commands to the program; the results are available via the before, after, match_str, and match_idx methods. Since Expect simulates a terminal, there will be extra \r characters at the end of each line in the result on UNIX at least. This is easily fixed

$res = $obj->before =~ tr/\r//d;
@lines = split "\n", $res ;

This is not done automatically.

Exceptions will be thrown on error match with /ExpectSimple/. Errors from Expect are available via the error_expect method. More human readable errors are available via the error method.

The connection is automatically broken by sending the specified disconnect command to the target when the ExpectSimple object is destroyed.