We’re happy to announce a new version of httr, a package designed to make it easy to work with web APIs. Httr is a wrapper around RCurl, and provides:

  • functions for the most important http verbs: GET, HEAD, PATCH, PUT, DELETE and POST.
  • automatic cookie handing across requests, connection sharing, and standard SSL config.
  • a request object which captures the body of the request along with request status, cookies, headers, timings and other useful information.
  • easy ways to access the response as a raw vector, a character vector, or parsed into an R object (for html, xml, json, png and jpeg).
  • wrapper functions for the most common configuration options: set_cookies, add_headers, authenticate, use_proxy, verbose, timeout.
  • 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_oauth2.0to 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).

Track httr’s development on github, and see what’s new in this version.