rest_api: Get data from a REST API

In yihui/xfun: Supporting Functions for Packages Maintained by 'Yihui Xie'

Get data from a REST API

Description

Read data from a REST API and optionally with an authorization token in the request header. The function rest_api_raw() returns the raw text of the response, and rest_api() will parse the response with jsonlite::fromJSON() (assuming that the response is in the JSON format).

Usage

rest_api(...)

rest_api_raw(root, endpoint, token = "", params = list(), headers = NULL)

github_api(
  endpoint,
  token = "",
  params = list(),
  headers = NULL,
  raw = !loadable("jsonlite")
)

Arguments

...	Arguments to be passed to rest_api_raw().
root	The API root URL.
endpoint	The API endpoint.
token	A named character string (e.g., c(token = "xxxx")), which will be used to create an authorization header of the form ‘⁠Authorization: NAME TOKEN⁠’ for the API call, where ‘⁠NAME⁠’ is the name of the string and ‘⁠TOKEN⁠’ is the string. If the string does not have a name, ‘⁠Basic⁠’ will be used as the default name.
params	A list of query parameters to be sent with the API call.
headers	A named character vector of HTTP headers, e.g., c(Accept = "application/vnd.github.v3+json").
raw	Whether to return the raw response or parse the response with jsonlite.

Details

These functions are simple wrappers based on url() and read_utf8(). Specifically, the headers argument is passed to url(), and read_utf8() will send a ‘⁠GET⁠’ request to the API server. This means these functions only support the ‘⁠GET⁠’ method. If you need to use other HTTP methods (such as ‘⁠POST⁠’), you have to use other packages such as curl and httr.

github_api() is a wrapper function based on rest_api_raw() to obtain data from the Github API: https://docs.github.com/en/rest. You can provide a personal access token (PAT) via the token argument, or via one of the environment variables GITHUB_PAT, GITHUB_TOKEN, GH_TOKEN. A PAT allows for a much higher rate limit in API calls. Without a token, you can only make 60 calls in an hour.

Value

A character vector (the raw JSON response) or an R object parsed from the JSON text.

Examples

# a normal GET request
xfun::rest_api("https://httpbin.org", "/get")
xfun::rest_api_raw("https://httpbin.org", "/get")

# send the request with an auth header
xfun::rest_api("https://httpbin.org", "/headers", "OPEN SESAME!")

# with query parameters
xfun::rest_api("https://httpbin.org", "/response-headers", params = list(foo = "bar"))

# get the rate limit info from Github
xfun::github_api("/rate_limit")

yihui/xfun documentation built on April 29, 2024, 12:16 p.m.