Httr

request is DSL for http requests for R, and is inspired by the CLI tool httpie. It’s built on httr. The following were driving principles for this package: The web is increasingly a JSON world, so we assume applications/json by default, but give back other types if not The workflow follows logically, or at least should, from, hey, I got this url, to i need to add some options, to execute request - and functions support piping so that you can execute functions in this order Whenever possible, we transform output to data.frame’s - facilitating downstream manipulation via dplyr, etc. We do GET requests by default. Specify a different type if you don’t want GET. Given GET by default, this client is optimized for consumption of data, rather than creating new things on servers You can use non-standard evaluation to easily pass in query parameters without worrying about &’s, URL escaping, etc. (see api_query()) Same for body params (see api_body()) The following is a brief demo of some of the package functionality: ...

Inspired by httpie, a Python command line client as a sort of drop in replacement for curl, I am playing around with something similar-ish in R, at least in spirit. I started a little R pkg called httsnap with the following ideas: The web is increasingly a JSON world, so set content-type and accept headers to applications/json by default The workflow follows logically, or at least should, from, hey, I got this url, to i need to add some options, to execute request Whenever possible, transform output to data.frame’s - facilitating downstream manipulation via dplyr, etc. Do GET requests by default. Specify a different type if you don’t want GET. Some functionality does GET by default, though in some cases you need to specify GET You can use non-standard evaluation to easily pass in query parameters without worrying about &’s, URL escaping, etc. (see Query()) Same for body params (see Body()) Install Install and load httsnap ...

At rOpenSci we occasssionally hear from our users that they run into an error like: Error in function (type, msg, asError = TRUE) : easy handled already used in multi handle This error occurs in the httr package that we use to do http requests to sources of data on the web. It happens when e.g., you make a lot of requests to a resource, then it gets interrupted somehow - then you make another call, and you get the error above. Let’s try it with the an version of httr (v0.5): ...