NEWS.md

httr 0.6.1.9000

httr 0.6.1

• Correctly parse headers with multiple :, thanks to @mmorgan (#180).

• In content(), if no type is provided to function or specified in headers, and we can't guess the type from the extension, we now assume that it's application/octet-stream (#181).

• Throw error if timeout() is less than 1 ms (#175).

• Improved LinkedIn OAuth demo (#173).

httr 0.6.0

New features

• New write_stream() allows you to process the response from a server as a stream of raw vectors (#143).

• Suport for Google OAuth2 service accounts. (#119, thanks to help from @siddharthab).

• VERB() allows to you use custom http verbs (#169).

• New handle_reset() to allow you to reset the handle if you get the error "easy handle already used in multi handle" (#112).

• Uses R6 instead of RC. This makes it possible to extend the OAuth classes from outside of httr (#113).

• Now only set capath on Windows - system defaults on linux and mac ox seem to be adequate (and in some cases better). I've added a couple of tests to ensure that this continues to work in the future.

Minor improvements and bug fixes

• vignette("api-packages") gains more detailed instructions on setting environment variables, thanks to @jennybc.

• Add revoke_all() to revoke all stored tokens (if possible) (#77).

• Fix for OAuth 2 process when using options(httr_oob_default = TRUE) (#126, @WillemPaling).

• New brew_dr() checks for common problems. Currently checks if your libCurl uses NSS. This is unlikely to work so it gives you some advice on how to fix the problem (thanks to @eddelbuettel for debugging this problem).

• Content-Type set to title case to avoid errors in servers which do not correctly implement case insensitivity in header names. (#142, #146) thanks to Håkon Malmedal (@hmalmedal) and Jim Hester (@jimhester).

• Correctly parse http status when it only contains two components (#162).

• Correctly parse http headers when field name is followed by any amount (including none) of white space.

• Default "Accepts" header set to application/json, text/xml, application/xml, */*: this should slightly increase the likelihood of getting xml back. application/xml is correctly converted to text before being parsed to XML::xmlParse() (#160).

• Make it again possible to override the content type set up by POST() when sending data (#140).

• New safe_callback() function operator that makes R functions safe for use as RCurl callbacks (#144).

• Added support for passing oauth1 tokens in URL instead of the headers (#145, @bogstag).

• Default to out-of-band credential exchange when httpuv isn't installed. (#168)

Deprecated and deleted functions

• new_token() has been removed - this was always an internal function so you should never have been using it. If you were, switch to creating the tokens directly.

• Deprecate guess_media(), and instead use mime::guess_type() (#148).

httr 0.5

• You can now save response bodies directly to disk by using the write_disk() config. This is useful if you want to capture large files that don't fit in memory (#44).

• Default accept header is now "application/json, text/xml, /" - this should encourage servers to send json or xml if they know how.

• httr_options() allows you to easily filter the options, e.g. httr_options("post")

• POST() now specifies Curl options more precisely so that Curl know's that you're doing a POST and can respond appropriately to redirects.

Caching

• Preliminary and experimental support for caching with cache_info() and rerequest() (#129). Be aware that this API is likely to change in the future.

• parse_http_date() parses http dates according RFC2616 spec.

• Requests now print the time they were made.

• Mime type application/xml is automatically parsed with ``XML::xmlParse()`. (#128)

Minor improvements and bug fixes

• Now possible to specify both handle and url when making a request.

• content(type = "text") uses readBin() instead of rawToChar() so that strings with embedded NULLs (e.g. WINDOWS-1252) can be re-encoded to UTF-8.

• DELETE() now returns body of request (#138).

• headers() is now a generic with a method for response objects.

• parse_media() failed to take into account that media types are case-insenstive - this lead to bad re-encoding for content-types like "text/html; Charset=UTF-8"

• Typo which broke set_cookies() fixed by @hrbrmstr.

• url_ok() works correctly now, instead of always returning FALSE, a bug since version 0.4 (#133).

• Remove redundant arguments simplifyDataFrame and simplifyMatrix for json parser.

httr 0.4

New features

• New headers() and cookies() functions to extract headers and cookies from responses. Previoulsy internal status_code() function now exported to extract status_code() from responses.

• POST(), PUT(), and PATCH() now use encode argument to determine how list inputs are encoded. Valid values are "multiple", "form" or "json". The multipart argument is now deprecated (#103). You can stream a single file from disk with upload_file("path/"). The mime type will be guessed from the extension, or can be supplied explicitly as the second argument to upload_file().

• progress() will display a progress bar, useful if you're doing large uploads or downloads (#17).

• verbose() now uses a custom debug function so that you can see exactly what data is sent to the server. Arguments control exactly what is included, and the defaults have been selected to be more helpful for the most common cases (#102).

• with_verbose() makes it easier to see verbose information when http requests are made within other functions (#87).

Documentation improvements

• New quickstart vignette to help you get up and running with httr.

• New api-packages vignette describes how best practices to follow when writing R packages that wrap web APIs.

• httr_options() lists all known config options, translating between their short R names and the full libcurl names. The curl_doc() helper function allows you to jump directly to the online documentation for an option.

Minor improvements

• authenticate() now defaults to type = "basic" which is pretty much the only type of authentication anyone uses.

• Updated cacert.pem to version at 2014-04-22 (#114).

• content_type(), content_type_xml() and content_type_json() make it easier to set the content type for POST requests (and other requests with a body).

• has_content() tells you if request has any content associated with it (#91).

• Add is_interactive() parameter to oauth_listener(), init_oauth1.0() and init_oauth2.0() (#90).

• oauth_signature() and oauth_header() now exported to make it easier to construct custom authentication for APIs that use only some components of the full OAuth process (e.g. 2 legged OAuth).

• NULL query parameters are now dropped automatically.

• When print()ing a response, httr will only attempt to print the first few lines if it's a text format (i.e. either the main type is text or is application/json). It will also truncate each line so that it fits on screen - this should hopefully make it easier to see a little bit of the content, without filling the screen with gibberish.

• new_bin() has been removed: it's easier to see what's going on in examples with httpbin.org.

Bug fixes

• user_agent() once again overrides default (closes #97)

• parse(type = "auto") returns NULL if no content associated with request (#91).

• Better strategy for resetting Curl handles prevents carry-over of error status and other problems (#112).

• set_config() and with_config() now work with tokens (#111).

httr 0.3

OAuth improvements

OAuth 2.0 has recieved a major overhaul in this version. The authentication dance now works in more environments (including RStudio), and is generally a little faster. When working on a remote server, or if R's internet connection is constrained in other ways, you can now use out-of-band authentication, copying and pasting from any browser to your R session. OAuth tokens from endpoints that regularly expire access tokens can now be refreshed, and will be refresh automatically on authentication failure.

httr now uses project (working directory) based caching: every time you create or refresh a token, a copy of the credentials will be saved in .httr-oauth. You can override this default for individual tokens with the cache parameter, or globally with the httr_oauth_cache option. Supply either a logical vector (TRUE = always cache, FALSE = never cache, NA = ask), or a string (the path to the cache file).

You should NOT include this cache file in source code control - if you do, delete it, and reset your access token through the corresponding web interface. To help, httr will automatically add appropriate entries to .gitignore and .Rbuildignore.

These changes mean that you should only ever have to authenticate once per project, and you can authenticate from any environment in which you can run R. A big thanks go to Craig Citro (@craigcitro) from google, who contributed much code and many ideas to make this possible.

• The OAuth token objects are now reference classes, which mean they can be updated in place, such as when an access token expires and needs to be refreshed. You can manually refresh by calling $refresh() on the object. You can force reinitialisation (to do the complete dance from scratch) by calling $reinit(force = TRUE).

• If a signed OAuth2 request fails with a 401 and the credentials have a refresh_token, then the OAuth token will be automatically refreshed (#74).

• OAuth tokens are cached locally in a file called .httr-oauth (unless you opt out). This file should not be included in source code control, and httr will automatically add to .gitignore and .Rbuildignore. The caching policy is described in more detail in the help for the Token class.

• The OAuth2 dance can now be performed without running a local webserver (#33, thanks to @craigcitro). To make that the default, set options(httr_oob_default = TRUE). This is useful when running R remotely.

• Add support for passing oauth2 tokens in headers instead of the URL, and make this the default (#34, thanks to @craigcitro).

• OAuth endpoints can store arbitrary extra urls.

• Use the httpuv webserver for the OAuth dance instead of the built-in httpd server (#32, thanks to @jdeboer). This makes the dance work in Rstudio, and also seems a little faster. Rook is no longer required.

• oauth_endpoints() includes some popular OAuth endpoints.

Other improvements

• HTTP verbs (GET(), POST() etc) now pass unnamed arguments to config() and named arguments to modify_url() (#81).

• The placement of ... in POST(), PATCH() and PUT() has been tweaked so that you must always specify body and multipart arguments with their full name. This has always been recommended practice; now it is enforced.

• httr includes its own copy of cacert.pem, which is more recent than the version included in RCurl (#67).

• Added default user agent which includes versions of Curl, RCurl and httr.

• Switched to jsonlite from rjson.

• Content parsers no longer load packages on to search path.

• stop_for_status() now raises errors with useful classes so that you can use tryCatch() to take different actions depending on the type of error. See http_condition() for more details.

• httr now imports the methods package so that it works when called with Rscript.

• New automatic parsers for mime types text/tab-separated-values and text/csv (#49)

• Add support for fragment in url building/parsing (#70, thanks to @craigcitro).

• You can suppress the body entirely in POST(), PATCH() and PUT() with body = FALSE.

Bug fixes

• If you supply multiple headers of the same name, the value of the most recently set header will always be used.

• Urls with missing query param values (e.g. http://x.com/?q=) are now parsed correctly (#27). The names of query params are now also escaped and unescaped correctly when parsing and building urls.

• Default html parser is now XML::htmlParse() which is easier to use with xpath (#66).

httr 0.2

• OAuth now uses custom escaping function which is guaranteed to work on all platforms (Fixes #21)

• When concatenating configs, concatenate all the headers. (Fixes #19)

• export hmac_sha1 since so many authentication protocols need this

• content will automatically guess what type of output (parsed, text or raw) based on the content-type header. It also automatically converts text content to UTF-8 (using the charset in the media type) and can guess at mime type from extension if server doesn't supply one. Media type and encoding can be overridden with the type and encoding arguments respectively.

• response objects automatically print content type to aid debugging.

• text_content has become context(, "text") and parsed_content content(, "parsed"). The previous calls are deprecated and will be removed in a future version.

• In oauth_listener, use existing httpd port if help server has already been started. This allows the ouath authentication dance to work if you're in RStudio. (Fixes #15).

• add several functions related to checking the status of an http request. Those are : status, url_ok and url_success as well as stop_for_status and warn_for_status.

• build_url: correctly add params back into full url.

httr 0.1.1

• Add new default config: use the standard SSL certificate

• Add recommendation to use custom handles with authenticate