Learn R
⚠️There's a newer version (1.0.0) of this package. Take me there.

curlconverter - Generate httr functions or parameters for use with httr from cURL commands.

Based on the curlconverter Node module by Nick Carneiro

Why curlconverter?

Deciphering web/REST API and XHR calls can be tricky, which is one reason why internet browsers provide "Copy as cURL" functionality within their "Developer Tools" pane(s). These cURL command-lines can be difficult to wrangle into an httr::GET or httr:POST request, but you can now "straighten" these "cURLs"" either from data copied to the system clipboard or by passing in a vector of cURL command-lines and getting back a list of parameter elements which can be used to form httr requests. These lists can be passed to another function to automagically make httr functions.

The following functions are implemented:

  • straighten: convert one or more "Copy as cURL" command lines into useful data
  • parse_query: parse URL query parameters into a named list
  • make_req: turn parsed cURL command lines into a httr request functions (i.e. returns working R functions)

News

  • Version 0.7.0 : See NEWS file.
  • Version 0.6.7 : Fixed bug in js module that caused the header parsing to fail if there was only one header. Fixes #4 (added this to the test suite)
  • Version 0.6.6 : Code cleanup & documentation update
  • Version 0.6.5 : Reads & sets cookies
  • Version 0.6.1 : Improved README https://github.com/hrbrmstr/curlconverter/issues/3
  • Version 0.6.0 : changed the idiom (examples below)
  • Version 0.5.0 : make_req now actually returns a working/callable R function
  • Version 0.4.0 : make_req turns the cURLs into httr requests
  • Version 0.3.1 : handles --header now (fixes #1)
  • Version 0.3.0 : Added parse_query
  • Version 0.2.0 : Added parsed URL to return value of straighten()
  • Version 0.1.0 released

Installation

devtools::install_github("hrbrmstr/curlconverter")

Usage

library(curlconverter)
library(jsonlite)
library(httr)

# current verison
packageVersion("curlconverter")
# [1] '0.7.0.9000'

Simple example using a call to https://httpbin.org/headers:

httpbinrhcurl <- "curl 'https://httpbin.org/headers' -H 'pragma: no-cache' -H 'accept-encoding: gzip, deflate, sdch' -H 'accept-language: en-US,en;q=0.8' -H 'upgrade-insecure-requests: 1' -H 'user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/49.0.2623.39 Safari/537.36' -H 'accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8' -H 'cache-control: no-cache' -H 'referer: https://httpbin.org/' --compressed"

res <- make_req(straighten(httpbinrhcurl))
# curl 'https://httpbin.org/headers' -H 'pragma: no-cache' -H 'accept-encoding: gzip, deflate, sdch' -H 'accept-language: en-US,en;q=0.8' -H 'upgrade-insecure-requests: 1' -H 'user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/49.0.2623.39 Safari/537.36' -H 'accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8' -H 'cache-control: no-cache' -H 'referer: https://httpbin.org/' --compressed

# or 

straighten(httpbinrhcurl) %>% 
  make_req() -> res
# curl 'https://httpbin.org/headers' -H 'pragma: no-cache' -H 'accept-encoding: gzip, deflate, sdch' -H 'accept-language: en-US,en;q=0.8' -H 'upgrade-insecure-requests: 1' -H 'user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/49.0.2623.39 Safari/537.36' -H 'accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8' -H 'cache-control: no-cache' -H 'referer: https://httpbin.org/' --compressed

toJSON(content(res[[1]](), as="parsed"), pretty=TRUE)
# {
#   "headers": {
#     "Accept": ["application/json, text/xml, application/xml, */*,text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8"],
#     "Accept-Encoding": ["gzip, deflate, sdch"],
#     "Accept-Language": ["en-US,en;q=0.8"],
#     "Cache-Control": ["no-cache"],
#     "Content-Length": ["0"],
#     "Host": ["httpbin.org"],
#     "Pragma": ["no-cache"],
#     "Referer": ["https://httpbin.org/"],
#     "Upgrade-Insecure-Requests": ["1"],
#     "User-Agent": ["Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/49.0.2623.39 Safari/537.36"]
#   }
# }

Slightly more complex one:

toJSON(straighten("curl 'http://financials.morningstar.com/ajax/ReportProcess4HtmlAjax.html?&t=XNAS:MSFT&region=usa&culture=en-US&cur=&reportType=is&period=12&dataType=A&order=asc&columnYear=5&curYearPart=1st5year&rounding=3&view=raw&r=973302&callback=jsonp1454021128757&_=1454021129337' -H 'Cookie: JSESSIONID=5E43C98903E865D72AA3C2DCEF317848; sfhabit=asc%7Craw%7C3%7C12%7CA%7C5%7Cv0.14; ScrollY=0' -H 'DNT: 1' -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, sdch' -H 'Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8' -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/47.0.2526.111 Safari/537.36' -H 'Accept: text/javascript, application/javascript, */*' -H 'Referer: http://financials.morningstar.com/income-statement/is.html?t=MSFT&region=usa&culture=en-US' -H 'X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest' -H 'Connection: keep-alive' -H 'Cache-Control: max-age=0' --compressed"), pretty=TRUE)
# curl 'http://financials.morningstar.com/ajax/ReportProcess4HtmlAjax.html?&t=XNAS:MSFT&region=usa&culture=en-US&cur=&reportType=is&period=12&dataType=A&order=asc&columnYear=5&curYearPart=1st5year&rounding=3&view=raw&r=973302&callback=jsonp1454021128757&_=1454021129337' -H 'Cookie: JSESSIONID=5E43C98903E865D72AA3C2DCEF317848; sfhabit=asc%7Craw%7C3%7C12%7CA%7C5%7Cv0.14; ScrollY=0' -H 'DNT: 1' -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, sdch' -H 'Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8' -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/47.0.2526.111 Safari/537.36' -H 'Accept: text/javascript, application/javascript, */*' -H 'Referer: http://financials.morningstar.com/income-statement/is.html?t=MSFT&region=usa&culture=en-US' -H 'X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest' -H 'Connection: keep-alive' -H 'Cache-Control: max-age=0' --compressed
# [
#   {
#     "url": ["http://financials.morningstar.com/ajax/ReportProcess4HtmlAjax.html?&t=XNAS:MSFT&region=usa&culture=en-US&cur=&reportType=is&period=12&dataType=A&order=asc&columnYear=5&curYearPart=1st5year&rounding=3&view=raw&r=973302&callback=jsonp1454021128757&_=1454021129337"],
#     "method": ["get"],
#     "headers": {
#       "DNT": ["1"],
#       "Accept-Encoding": ["gzip, deflate, sdch"],
#       "Accept-Language": ["en-US,en;q=0.8"],
#       "User-Agent": ["Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/47.0.2526.111 Safari/537.36"],
#       "Accept": ["text/javascript, application/javascript, */*"],
#       "Referer": ["http://financials.morningstar.com/income-statement/is.html?t=MSFT&region=usa&culture=en-US"],
#       "X-Requested-With": ["XMLHttpRequest"],
#       "Connection": ["keep-alive"],
#       "Cache-Control": ["max-age=0"]
#     },
#     "cookies": {
#       "JSESSIONID": ["5E43C98903E865D72AA3C2DCEF317848"],
#       "sfhabit": ["asc%7Craw%7C3%7C12%7CA%7C5%7Cv0.14"],
#       "ScrollY": ["0"]
#     },
#     "url_parts": ["structure(list(scheme = \"http\", hostname = \"financials.morningstar.com\", ", "    port = NULL, path = \"ajax/ReportProcess4HtmlAjax.html\", query = structure(list(", "        \"\", t = \"XNAS:MSFT\", region = \"usa\", culture = \"en-US\", ", "        cur = \"\", reportType = \"is\", period = \"12\", dataType = \"A\", ", "        order = \"asc\", columnYear = \"5\", curYearPart = \"1st5year\", ", "        rounding = \"3\", view = \"raw\", r = \"973302\", callback = \"jsonp1454021128757\", ", "        \"_\" = \"1454021129337\"), .Names = c(\"\", \"t\", \"region\", ", "    \"culture\", \"cur\", \"reportType\", \"period\", \"dataType\", \"order\", ", "    \"columnYear\", \"curYearPart\", \"rounding\", \"view\", \"r\", \"callback\", ", "    \"_\")), params = NULL, fragment = NULL, username = NULL, password = NULL), .Names = c(\"scheme\", ", "\"hostname\", \"port\", \"path\", \"query\", \"params\", \"fragment\", \"username\", ", "\"password\"), class = \"function\")"],
#     "orig_curl": ["curl 'http://financials.morningstar.com/ajax/ReportProcess4HtmlAjax.html?&t=XNAS:MSFT&region=usa&culture=en-US&cur=&reportType=is&period=12&dataType=A&order=asc&columnYear=5&curYearPart=1st5year&rounding=3&view=raw&r=973302&callback=jsonp1454021128757&_=1454021129337' -H 'Cookie: JSESSIONID=5E43C98903E865D72AA3C2DCEF317848; sfhabit=asc%7Craw%7C3%7C12%7CA%7C5%7Cv0.14; ScrollY=0' -H 'DNT: 1' -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, sdch' -H 'Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8' -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/47.0.2526.111 Safari/537.36' -H 'Accept: text/javascript, application/javascript, */*' -H 'Referer: http://financials.morningstar.com/income-statement/is.html?t=MSFT&region=usa&culture=en-US' -H 'X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest' -H 'Connection: keep-alive' -H 'Cache-Control: max-age=0' --compressed"]
#   }
# ]

There are some built-in test files you can play with:

(curl_line <- readLines(system.file("extdata/curl5.txt", package="curlconverter"), warn=FALSE))
# [1] "curl -i -X POST http://1.2.3.4/endpoint -H \"Content-Type:application/json\" -H 'key:abcdefg'"

toJSON(straighten(curl_line, quiet=TRUE), pretty=TRUE)
# [
#   {
#     "url": ["http://1.2.3.4/endpoint"],
#     "method": ["post"],
#     "headers": {
#       "Content-Type": ["application/json"],
#       "key": ["abcdefg"]
#     },
#     "url_parts": ["structure(list(scheme = \"http\", hostname = \"1.2.3.4\", port = NULL, ", "    path = \"endpoint\", query = NULL, params = NULL, fragment = NULL, ", "    username = NULL, password = NULL), .Names = c(\"scheme\", \"hostname\", ", "\"port\", \"path\", \"query\", \"params\", \"fragment\", \"username\", \"password\"", "), class = \"function\")"],
#     "orig_curl": ["curl -i -X POST http://1.2.3.4/endpoint -H \"Content-Type:application/json\" -H 'key:abcdefg'"]
#   }
# ]
(curl_line <- readLines(system.file("extdata/curl8.txt", package="curlconverter"), warn=FALSE))
# [1] "curl 'https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/MKTGDPSAA646NWDB/downloaddata' -H 'Pragma: no-cache' -H 'Origin: https://research.stlouisfed.org' -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate' -H 'Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8' -H 'Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1' -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/49.0.2623.39 Safari/537.36' -H 'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded' -H 'Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8' -H 'Cache-Control: no-cache' -H 'Referer: https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/MKTGDPSAA646NWDB/downloaddata' -H 'Connection: keep-alive' -H 'DNT: 1' --data 'form%5Bnative_frequency%5D=Annual&form%5Bunits%5D=lin&form%5Bfrequency%5D=Annual&form%5Baggregation%5D=Average&form%5Bobs_start_date%5D=1968-01-01&form%5Bobs_end_date%5D=2014-01-01&form%5Bfile_format%5D=csv&form%5Bdownload_data_2%5D=' --compressed"

# example with query parameters in the body
req <- straighten(curl_line, quiet=FALSE)
# curl 'https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/MKTGDPSAA646NWDB/downloaddata' -H 'Pragma: no-cache' -H 'Origin: https://research.stlouisfed.org' -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate' -H 'Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8' -H 'Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1' -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/49.0.2623.39 Safari/537.36' -H 'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded' -H 'Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8' -H 'Cache-Control: no-cache' -H 'Referer: https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/MKTGDPSAA646NWDB/downloaddata' -H 'Connection: keep-alive' -H 'DNT: 1' --data 'form%5Bnative_frequency%5D=Annual&form%5Bunits%5D=lin&form%5Bfrequency%5D=Annual&form%5Baggregation%5D=Average&form%5Bobs_start_date%5D=1968-01-01&form%5Bobs_end_date%5D=2014-01-01&form%5Bfile_format%5D=csv&form%5Bdownload_data_2%5D=' --compressed

# ugh
(req[[1]]$data)
# [1] "form%5Bnative_frequency%5D=Annual&form%5Bunits%5D=lin&form%5Bfrequency%5D=Annual&form%5Baggregation%5D=Average&form%5Bobs_start_date%5D=1968-01-01&form%5Bobs_end_date%5D=2014-01-01&form%5Bfile_format%5D=csv&form%5Bdownload_data_2%5D="

#yay!
toJSON(parse_query(req[[1]]$data), pretty=TRUE)
# {
#   "form[native_frequency]": ["Annual"],
#   "form[units]": ["lin"],
#   "form[frequency]": ["Annual"],
#   "form[aggregation]": ["Average"],
#   "form[obs_start_date]": ["1968-01-01"],
#   "form[obs_end_date]": ["2014-01-01"],
#   "form[file_format]": ["csv"],
#   "form[download_data_2]": [""]
# }

Spinning straw into gold

curl_line <- c('curl "http://anasim.iet.unipi.it/moniqa/php/from_js.php" -H "Origin: http://anasim.iet.unipi.it" -H "Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate" -H "Accept-Language: it-IT,it;q=0.8,en-US;q=0.6,en;q=0.4" -H "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/48.0.2564.103 Safari/537.36" -H "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8" -H "Accept: */*" -H "Referer: http://anasim.iet.unipi.it/moniqa/" -H "X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest" -H "Connection: keep-alive" --data "deviceid=65&function_name=extract_measurements" --compressed')

straighten(curl_line) %>% 
  make_req() -> get_data
# curl "http://anasim.iet.unipi.it/moniqa/php/from_js.php" -H "Origin: http://anasim.iet.unipi.it" -H "Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate" -H "Accept-Language: it-IT,it;q=0.8,en-US;q=0.6,en;q=0.4" -H "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/48.0.2564.103 Safari/537.36" -H "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8" -H "Accept: */*" -H "Referer: http://anasim.iet.unipi.it/moniqa/" -H "X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest" -H "Connection: keep-alive" --data "deviceid=65&function_name=extract_measurements" --compressed

toJSON(content(get_data[[1]](), as="parsed"), pretty=TRUE)
# {
#   "sensors": [
#     {
#       "fk_sensortype": ["1"]
#     },
#     {
#       "fk_sensortype": ["4"]
#     },
#     {
#       "fk_sensortype": ["6"]
#     },
#     {
#       "fk_sensortype": ["8"]
#     }
#   ],
#   "measures": [
#     {
#       "measure": ["22"],
#       "fk_sensortype": ["1"],
#       "date": ["1458082800000"]
#     },
#     {
#       "measure": ["12"],
#       "fk_sensortype": ["4"],
#       "date": ["1458082800000"]
#     },
#     {
#       "measure": ["7"],
#       "fk_sensortype": ["6"],
#       "date": ["1458082800000"]
#     },
#     {
#       "measure": ["0.4"],
#       "fk_sensortype": ["8"],
#       "date": ["1458082800000"]
#     }
#   ]
# }

That also sends this to the console:

VERB(verb = "POST", 
     url = "http://anasim.iet.unipi.it/moniqa/php/from_js.php", 
     add_headers(Origin = "http://anasim.iet.unipi.it", 
                 `Accept-Encoding` = "gzip, deflate", 
                 `Accept-Language` = "it-IT,it;q=0.8,en-US;q=0.6,en;q=0.4", 
                 `User-Agent` = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/48.0.2564.103 Safari/537.36", 
                 Accept = "*/*", 
                 Referer = "http://anasim.iet.unipi.it/moniqa/", 
                 `X-Requested-With` = "XMLHttpRequest", 
                 Connection = "keep-alive"), 
     body = list(deviceid = "1", 
                 function_name = "extract_measurements"), 
     encode = "form")

Test Results

library(curlconverter)
library(testthat)

date()
# [1] "Thu Mar 17 21:52:15 2016"

test_dir("tests/")
# testthat results ========================================================================================================
# OK: 1 SKIPPED: 0 FAILED: 0

Code of Conduct

Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct.

By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms.

Copy Link

Version

Down Chevron

Monthly Downloads

10

Version

0.7.0

License

AGPL

Maintainer

Bob Rudis

Last Published

March 29th, 2016

Functions in curlconverter (0.7.0)