/httr

Primary LanguageR

httr

The aim of httr is to provide a wrapper for RCurl that is less configurable but 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 the standard root-level SSL certificate store is used.

  • a request object which captures the body of the request along with http status code, cookies, headers, timings and 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).

    • convert http errors into R errors with stop_for_status

  • wrapper functions for the most common configuration options: set_cookies, add_headers, authenticate, use_proxy, verbose, timeout.

  • url parsing (with parse_url) and modification (with modify_url)

  • support for OAuth 1.0 and 2.0. Use oauth1.0_token and oauth2.0_token to get user tokens, and sign_oauth1.0 and sign_oauth2.0 to sign requests. The demos directory has six demos of using OAuth: three for 1.0 (linkedin, twitter and vimeo) and three for 2.0 (facebook, github, google).

httr wouldn't be possible without the hard work of the authors of RCurl and Curl. Thanks! httr is inspired by http libraries in other languages, such as Resty, Requests and httparty.

Availability

httr is still under active development, so you may want to get the development version rather than the CRAN version. You can get the latest version from github with:

library(devtools)
install_github("httr")