Perl 5 version 14.3 documentation

HTTP::Tiny

NAME

HTTP::Tiny - A small, simple, correct HTTP/1.1 client

VERSION

version 0.012

SYNOPSIS

  1.     use HTTP::Tiny;
  3.     my $response = HTTP::Tiny->new->get('http://example.com/');
  5.     die "Failed!\n" unless $response->{success};
  7.     print "$response->{status} $response->{reason}\n";
  9.     while (my ($k, $v) = each %{$response->{headers}}) {
  10.         for (ref $v eq 'ARRAY' ? @$v : $v) {
  11.             print "$k: $_\n";
  12.         }
  13.     }
  15.     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

  1.     $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

  1.     $response = $http->get($url);
  2.     $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

  1.     $response = $http->mirror($url, $file, \%options)
  2.     if ( $response->{success} ) {
  3.         print "$file is up to date\n";
  4.     }

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

  1.     $response = $http->request($method, $url);
  2.     $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 to close.

  • Direct https connections are supported only if IO::Socket::SSL is installed. There is no support for https 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 set max_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. Unexpected 1XX 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

  1.   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.