Perl 5 version 14.3 documentation
HTTP::Tiny
NAME
HTTP::Tiny - A small, simple, correct HTTP/1.1 client
VERSION
version 0.012
SYNOPSIS
- use HTTP::Tiny;
- my $response = HTTP::Tiny->new->get('http://example.com/');
- die "Failed!\n" unless $response->{success};
- print "$response->{status} $response->{reason}\n";
- while (my ($k, $v) = each %{$response->{headers}}) {
- for (ref $v eq 'ARRAY' ? @$v : $v) {
- print "$k: $_\n";
- }
- }
- print $response->{content} if length $response->{content};
DESCRIPTION
This is a very simple HTTP/1.1 client, designed primarily for doing simple GET requests without the overhead of a large framework like LWP::UserAgent.
It is more correct and more complete than HTTP::Lite. It supports proxies (currently only non-authenticating ones) and redirection. It also correctly resumes after EINTR.
METHODS
new
- $http = HTTP::Tiny->new( %attributes );
This constructor returns a new HTTP::Tiny object. Valid attributes include:
-
agent
A user-agent string (defaults to 'HTTP::Tiny/$VERSION')
-
default_headers
A hashref of default headers to apply to requests
-
max_redirect
Maximum number of redirects allowed (defaults to 5)
-
max_size
Maximum response size (only when not using a data callback). If defined, responses larger than this will die with an error message
-
proxy
URL of a proxy server to use.
-
timeout
Request timeout in seconds (default is 60)
get
- $response = $http->get($url);
- $response = $http->get($url, \%options);
Executes a GET
request for the given URL. The URL must have unsafe
characters escaped and international domain names encoded. Internally, it just
calls request()
with 'GET' as the method. See request()
for valid
options and a description of the response.
mirror
- $response = $http->mirror($url, $file, \%options)
- if ( $response->{success} ) {
- print "$file is up to date\n";
- }
Executes a GET
request for the URL and saves the response body to the file
name provided. The URL must have unsafe characters escaped and international
domain names encoded. If the file already exists, the request will includes an
If-Modified-Since
header with the modification timestamp of the file. You
may specificy a different If-Modified-Since
header yourself in the $options->{headers}
hash.
The success
field of the response will be true if the status code is 2XX
or 304 (unmodified).
If the file was modified and the server response includes a properly
formatted Last-Modified
header, the file modification time will
be updated accordingly.
request
- $response = $http->request($method, $url);
- $response = $http->request($method, $url, \%options);
Executes an HTTP request of the given method type ('GET', 'HEAD', 'POST', 'PUT', etc.) on the given URL. The URL must have unsafe characters escaped and international domain names encoded. A hashref of options may be appended to modify the request.
Valid options are:
-
headers
A hashref containing headers to include with the request. If the value for a header is an array reference, the header will be output multiple times with each value in the array. These headers over-write any default headers.
-
content
A scalar to include as the body of the request OR a code reference that will be called iteratively to produce the body of the response
-
trailer_callback
A code reference that will be called if it exists to provide a hashref of trailing headers (only used with chunked transfer-encoding)
-
data_callback
A code reference that will be called for each chunks of the response body received.
If the content
option is a code reference, it will be called iteratively
to provide the content body of the request. It should return the empty
string or undef when the iterator is exhausted.
If the data_callback
option is provided, it will be called iteratively until
the entire response body is received. The first argument will be a string
containing a chunk of the response body, the second argument will be the
in-progress response hash reference, as described below. (This allows
customizing the action of the callback based on the status
or headers
received prior to the content body.)
The request
method returns a hashref containing the response. The hashref
will have the following keys:
-
success
Boolean indicating whether the operation returned a 2XX status code
-
status
The HTTP status code of the response
-
reason
The response phrase returned by the server
-
content
The body of the response. If the response does not have any content or if a data callback is provided to consume the response body, this will be the empty string
-
headers
A hashref of header fields. All header field names will be normalized to be lower case. If a header is repeated, the value will be an arrayref; it will otherwise be a scalar string containing the value
On an exception during the execution of the request, the status
field will
contain 599, and the content
field will contain the text of the exception.
LIMITATIONS
HTTP::Tiny is conditionally compliant with the HTTP/1.1 specification. It attempts to meet all "MUST" requirements of the specification, but does not implement all "SHOULD" requirements.
Some particular limitations of note include:
-
HTTP::Tiny focuses on correct transport. Users are responsible for ensuring that user-defined headers and content are compliant with the HTTP/1.1 specification.
-
Users must ensure that URLs are properly escaped for unsafe characters and that international domain names are properly encoded to ASCII. See URI::Escape, URI::_punycode and Net::IDN::Encode.
-
Redirection is very strict against the specification. Redirection is only automatic for response codes 301, 302 and 307 if the request method is 'GET' or 'HEAD'. Response code 303 is always converted into a 'GET' redirection, as mandated by the specification. There is no automatic support for status 305 ("Use proxy") redirections.
-
Persistant connections are not supported. The
Connection
header will always be set toclose
. -
Direct
https
connections are supported only if IO::Socket::SSL is installed. There is no support forhttps
connections via proxy. Any SSL certificate that matches the host is accepted -- SSL certificates are not verified against certificate authorities. -
Cookies are not directly supported. Users that set a
Cookie
header should also setmax_redirect
to zero to ensure cookies are not inappropriately re-transmitted. -
Proxy environment variables are not supported.
-
There is no provision for delaying a request body using an
Expect
header. Unexpected1XX
responses are silently ignored as per the specification. -
Only 'chunked'
Transfer-Encoding
is supported. -
There is no support for a Request-URI of '*' for the 'OPTIONS' request.
SEE ALSO
SUPPORT
Bugs / Feature Requests
Please report any bugs or feature requests by email to bug-http-tiny at rt.cpan.org
, or through
the web interface at http://rt.cpan.org/Public/Dist/Display.html?Name=HTTP-Tiny. You will be automatically notified of any
progress on the request by the system.
Source Code
This is open source software. The code repository is available for public review and contribution under the terms of the license.
http://github.com/dagolden/p5-http-tiny/tree
- git clone git://github.com/dagolden/p5-http-tiny.git
AUTHORS
-
Christian Hansen <chansen@cpan.org>
-
David Golden <dagolden@cpan.org>
COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
This software is copyright (c) 2011 by Christian Hansen.
This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.