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httrvshttpclient

MIT 2 9 988
935.0 thousand (month) May 06 2012 1.4.7(1 year, 5 months ago)
702 4 98 ruby
Jul 25 2009 4.1 million (month) 2.8.3(7 years ago)

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.

HTTPClient is a Ruby gem that provides a simple and flexible interface for making HTTP requests. It's a full-featured HTTP client library with support for cookies, redirects, proxy, and more. It's built on top of the libwww-perl library, which is a widely-used, robust and well-documented library.

Features:

  • methods like GET/HEAD/POST/* via HTTP/1.1.
  • HTTPS(SSL), Cookies, proxy, authentication(Digest, NTLM, Basic), etc.
  • asynchronous HTTP request, streaming HTTP request.
  • debug mode CLI.
  • by contrast with net/http in standard distribution;
  • Cookies support
  • MT-safe
  • streaming POST (POST with File/IO)
  • Digest auth
  • Negotiate/NTLM auth for WWW-Authenticate (requires net/ntlm module; rubyntlm gem)
  • NTLM auth for Proxy-Authenticate (requires 'win32/sspi' module; rubysspi gem)
  • extensible with filter interface
  • you don't have to care HTTP/1.1 persistent connection (httpclient cares instead of you)

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 'httpclient'

client = HTTPClient.new
# GET requests
response = client.get("http://httpbin.org/get")
puts response.content

# POST requests
data = { name: "value" }
response = client.post("http://httpbin.org/post", data)
puts response.content

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