title: What's the simplest way to make a HTTP GET request in Perl?
body: <p>I have some code I've written in PHP for consuming our simple webservice, which I'd also like to provide in Perl for users who may prefer that language. What's the simplest method of making a HTTP request to do that? In PHP I can do it in one line with <code>file_get_contents()</code>.</p>
  
  <p>Here's the entire code I want to port to Perl:</p>
  
  <pre class="lang-php prettyprint-override"><code>/**
   * Makes a remote call to the our API, and returns the response
   * @param cmd {string} - command string ID
   * @param argsArray {array} - associative array of argument names and argument values
   * @return {array} - array of responses
   */
  function callAPI( $cmd, $argsArray=array() )
  {
     $apikey="MY_API_KEY";
     $secret="MY_SECRET";
     $apiurl="https://foobar.com/api";
  
     // timestamp this API was submitted (for security reasons)
     $epoch_time=time();
  
     //--- assemble argument array into string
     $query = "cmd=" .$cmd;
     foreach ($argsArray as $argName =&gt; $argValue) {
         $query .= "&amp;" . $argName . "=" . urlencode($argValue);
     }
     $query .= "&amp;key=". $apikey . "&amp;time=" . $epoch_time;
  
     //--- make md5 hash of the query + secret string
     $md5 = md5($query . $secret);
     $url = $apiurl . "?" . $query . "&amp;md5=" . $md5;
  
     //--- make simple HTTP GET request, put the server response into $response
     $response = file_get_contents($url);
  
     //--- convert "|" (pipe) delimited string to array
     $responseArray = explode("|", $response);
     return $responseArray;
  }
  </code></pre>