Often you want to connect to a site to get data that requires a name and password, but you want a simple interface. For instance one that will work with LWP::Simple. The following form of a URL is documented but apparently not as widely known as it deserves to be.

It should work for all protocols.

EDIT
A piece of trivia. Hotmail has an interesting use for this. Their name/password form is submitted by https to a script that does nothing but redirect to a URL with the name and password inserted as above, that will require Digest authentication. The browser without prompting then uses the name and password (as originally typed in their form) and from then on has http authentication loaded.

Turning form entries into http authentication securely without encrypting your whole site is something that a lot of people think is impossible. Well it is not, and that is how you do it! :-)

http://name:password@www.somedomain.com/whatever/page.html
[download]