Hacking Gmail

180 Part III — Conquering Gmail

Showing Your Current Contacts

Once you’ve got your old contacts in there and have added a load more, you might

want to list those and access them programmatically. Listing 12-2 shows you how.

Listing 12-2: Getting Your Contacts

use Utils;

$gmail = login();

(@contacts) = @{ $gmail->get_contacts() }; # simply get all

contacts

foreach (@contacts) { # and iterate

though them

print $_->{“name1”}. “\t”. $_->{“email”}. “\n”; #

output contact data

}

The Mail::Webmail::Gmail module provides for this with one lovely bite-sized

function:get_contacts(). This returns an array hash of your contacts, in this

format:

$contact{ ‘id’ }

$contact{ ‘name1’ }

$contact{ ‘name2’ }

$contact{ ‘email’ }

$contact{ ‘note’ }

And so, in the core of the script in Listing 12-2, you are just looping through the

Arrays of Hashes and printing out the first name and e-mail address. You could,

of course, change this to use the other values, too:

foreach (@contacts) {

print $_->{“name1”}. $_->{“name2”}. $_->{“id”}. “\t”.

$_->{“email”}. “\t”. $_->{“note”}. “\n”;

}

The get_contacts()function can also be limited to the Frequently Mailed

contacts with the frequent flag:

my $contacts = $gmail->get_contacts( frequent => 1 );