Hi everybody, I think that I am missing something fundamental in how strings are passed from a postForm() call in R to the curl or libcurl functions underneath. For example, I can do the following using curl from the command line:
$ curl -d "Archbishop Huxley" "http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/text2people"; [{"gender":"u","first_name":"","title":"archbishop","surnames":"Huxley","start_index":0,"end_index":17,"matched_string":"Archbishop Huxley"}] Trying the same thing, or what I *think* is the same thing (obvious not) in R (Mac OS 10.6.7, R 2.13.0) produces: > library(RCurl) Loading required package: bitops > api <- "http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/text2people"; > postForm(api, a="Archbishop Huxley") [1] "[{\"gender\":\"u\",\"first_name\":\"\",\"title\":\"archbishop\",\"surnames\":\"Huxley\",\"start_index\":44,\"end_index\":61,\"matched_string\":\"Archbishop Huxley\"},{\"gender\":\"u\",\"first_name\":\"\",\"title\":\"archbishop\",\"surnames\":\"Huxley\",\"start_index\":88,\"end_index\":105,\"matched_string\":\"Archbishop Huxley\"}]" attr(,"Content-Type") charset "text/html" "utf-8" I can match the result given on the DSTK API's website by using system(), but doesn't seem like the R-like way of doing something. > system("curl -d 'Archbishop Huxley' > 'http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/text2people'") 158 141 141 141 0[{"gender":"u","first_name":"","title":"archbishop","surnames":"Huxley","start_index":0,"end_index":17,"matched_string":"Archbishop Huxley"}] 17 599 72 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 670 If you want to see some additional information related to this question, I posted on StackOverflow a few days ago: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5797688/post-request-using-rcurl I am working on this R wrapper for the data science toolkit as a way of illustrating how to make an R package for the Denver RUG and ran into this problem. Any help to this problem will be greatly appreciated by the Denver RUG! Cheers, Ryan ______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
