Parsing out HTTP requests from Wireshark/Ethereal saved packet capture file (libpcap format)?

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Hi,
 
Don't know if anyone has done something similar before, as I don't want
to reinvent the wheel if I don't have to. Whether anyone has done such
before, I could use some advice if any.
 
I'd like to automate some web configuration that occurs from Java
applets making HTTP POST requests to some ASP server script pages (I
prefer this idea over GUI automation of the Java applets to do the same
configuration). I'd like to parse out the HTTP request information &
extract the URL and POST data from a script (like Perl) instead of
manually analyzing the HTTP requests to do the same. I was thinking of
parsing saved capture files in libpcap format from Wireshark/Ethereal
instead of real-time capture & parsing of the requests in Perl and some
libpcap library. Then I could (nearly) automate building a Perl user
agent script that would do the same web configuration.
 
It looks to be feasible except that the saved capture file has non-ASCII
garbled junk padded in between the HTTP request/response body & the next
HTTP request/response header field. And this non-ASCII garbled junk has
some ASCII characters in it also. This part would be more troublesome to
parse out.
 
So I was wondering if someone has already done a similar HTTP request
parsing framework that I could use or if there is a way to save/extract
(in Wireshark/Ethereal, etc.) the HTTP requests as pure ASCII messages
as defined in the RFCs (without all the garbled junk in between) so that
it would be easier to parse.
 
Regards,
 
David Luu

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