curl_fetch: Fetch the contents of a URL

In curl: A Modern and Flexible Web Client for R

Fetch the contents of a URL

Description

Low-level bindings to write data from a URL into memory, disk or a callback function.

Usage

curl_fetch_memory(url, handle = new_handle())

curl_fetch_disk(url, path, handle = new_handle())

curl_fetch_stream(url, fun, handle = new_handle())

curl_fetch_multi(
  url,
  done = NULL,
  fail = NULL,
  pool = NULL,
  data = NULL,
  handle = new_handle()
)

curl_fetch_echo(url, handle = new_handle())

Arguments

url	A character string naming the URL of a resource to be downloaded.
handle	A curl handle object.
path	Path to save results
fun	Callback function. Should have one argument, which will be a raw vector.
done	callback function for completed request. Single argument with response data in same structure as curl_fetch_memory.
fail	callback function called on failed request. Argument contains error message.
pool	a multi handle created by new_pool. Default uses a global pool.
data	(advanced) callback function, file path, or connection object for writing incoming data. This callback should only be used for streaming applications, where small pieces of incoming data get written before the request has completed. The signature for the callback function is write(data, final = FALSE). If set to NULL the entire response gets buffered internally and returned by in the done callback (which is usually what you want).

Details

The ⁠curl_fetch_*()⁠ functions automatically raise an error upon protocol problems (network, disk, TLS, etc.) but do not implement application logic. For example, you need to check the status code of HTTP requests in the response by yourself, and deal with it accordingly.

Both curl_fetch_memory() and curl_fetch_disk have a blocking and a non-blocking C implementation. The latter is slightly slower but allows for interrupting the download prematurely (using e.g. CTRL+C or ESC). Interrupting is enabled when R runs in interactive mode or when getOption("curl_interrupt") == TRUE.

The curl_fetch_multi() function is the asynchronous equivalent of curl_fetch_memory(). It wraps multi_add() to schedule requests which are executed concurrently when calling multi_run(). For each successful request, the done callback is triggered with response data. For failed requests (when curl_fetch_memory() would raise an error), the fail function is triggered with the error message.

Examples

# Load in memory
res <- curl_fetch_memory("https://hb.cran.dev/cookies/set?foo=123&bar=ftw")
res$content

# Save to disk
res <- curl_fetch_disk("https://hb.cran.dev/stream/10", tempfile())
res$content
readLines(res$content)

# Stream with callback
drip_url <- "https://hb.cran.dev/drip?duration=3&numbytes=15&code=200"
res <- curl_fetch_stream(drip_url, function(x){
  cat(rawToChar(x))
})

# Async API
data <- list()
success <- function(res){
  cat("Request done! Status:", res$status, "\n")
  data <<- c(data, list(res))
}
failure <- function(msg){
  cat("Oh noes! Request failed!", msg, "\n")
}
curl_fetch_multi("https://hb.cran.dev/get", success, failure)
curl_fetch_multi("https://hb.cran.dev/status/418", success, failure)
curl_fetch_multi("https://urldoesnotexist.xyz", success, failure)
multi_run()
str(data)

curl documentation built on June 8, 2025, 11:35 a.m.