httrvsexcon
The aim of httr is to provide a wrapper for the curl package, customised to the demands of modern web APIs.
Key features:
- Functions for the most important http verbs: GET(), HEAD(), PATCH(), PUT(), DELETE() and POST().
- Automatic connection sharing across requests to the same website (by default, curl handles are managed automatically), cookies are maintained across requests, and a up-to-date root-level SSL certificate store is used.
- Requests return a standard reponse object that captures the http status line, headers and body, along with other useful information.
- Response content is available with content() as a raw vector (as = "raw"), a character vector (as = "text"), or parsed into an R object (as = "parsed"), currently for html, xml, json, png and jpeg.
- You can convert http errors into R errors with stop_for_status().
- Config functions make it easier to modify the request in common ways: set_cookies(), add_headers(), authenticate(), use_proxy(), verbose(), timeout(), content_type(), accept(), progress().
- Support for OAuth 1.0 and 2.0 with oauth1.0_token() and oauth2.0_token(). The demo directory has eight OAuth demos: four for 1.0 (twitter, vimeo, withings and yahoo) and four for 2.0 (facebook, github, google, linkedin). OAuth credentials are automatically cached within a project.
Excon is a Ruby library for making HTTP requests. It is designed to be fast and efficient, and is often used as a building block for other Ruby libraries and frameworks.
One of the main features of Excon is its support for persistent connections, which allows it to reuse the same connection for multiple requests, reducing the overhead of establishing a new connection for each request.
Excon also supports streaming requests and responses, which allows you to read or write data to the server incrementally, without having to load the entire response into memory at once.
Example Use
library(httr)
# GET requests:
resp <- GET("http://httpbin.org/get")
status_code(resp) # status code
headers(resp) # headers
str(content(resp)) # body
# POST requests:
# Form encoded
resp <- POST(url, body = body, encode = "form")
# Multipart encoded
resp <- POST(url, body = body, encode = "multipart")
# JSON encoded
resp <- POST(url, body = body, encode = "json")
# setting cookies:
resp <- GET("http://httpbin.org/cookies", set_cookies("MeWant" = "cookies"))
content(r)$cookies # get response cookies
require 'excon'
# GET requests
response = Excon.get('https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/1')
puts response.body
puts response.status
puts response.headers
# POST requests
response = Excon.post('https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts',
:body => { :title => 'foo', :body => 'bar', :userId => 1 }.to_json,
:headers => { 'Content-Type' => 'application/json' } )
puts response.body