Hi Ryan
postForm() is using a different style (or specifically Content-Type) of
submitting the form than the curl -d command.
Switching the style = 'POST' uses the same type, but at a quick guess,
the parameter name 'a' is causing confusion
and the result is the empty JSON array - "[]".
A quick workaround is to use curlPerform() directly rather than postForm()
r = dynCurlReader()
curlPerform(postfields = 'Archbishop Huxley', url =
'http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/text2people', verbose = TRUE,
post = 1L, writefunction = r$update)
r$value()
This yields
[1]
"[{\"gender\":\"u\",\"first_name\":\"\",\"title\":\"archbishop\",\"surnames\":\"Huxley\",\"start_index\":0,\"end_index\":17,\"matched_string\":\"Archbishop
Huxley\"}]"
and you can use fromJSON() to transform it into data in R.
D.
On 4/29/11 12:14 PM, Elmore, Ryan wrote:> Hi everybody,
>
> I think that I am missing something fundamental in how strings are passed
from a postForm() call in R to the curl or libcurl functions underneath. For
example, I can do the following using curl from the command line:
>
> $ curl -d "Archbishop Huxley"
"http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/text2people"
>
[{"gender":"u","first_name":"","title":"archbishop","surnames":"Huxley","start_index":0,"end_index":17,"matched_string":"Archbishop
Huxley"}]
>
> Trying the same thing, or what I *think* is the same thing (obvious not) in
R (Mac OS 10.6.7, R 2.13.0) produces:
>
>> library(RCurl)
> Loading required package: bitops
>> api <- "http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/text2people"
>> postForm(api, a="Archbishop Huxley")
> [1]
"[{\"gender\":\"u\",\"first_name\":\"\",\"title\":\"archbishop\",\"surnames\":\"Huxley\",\"start_index\":44,\"end_index\":61,\"matched_string\":\"Archbishop
Huxley\"},{\"gender\":\"u\",\"first_name\":\"\",\"title\":\"archbishop\",\"surnames\":\"Huxley\",\"start_index\":88,\"end_index\":105,\"matched_string\":\"Archbishop
Huxley\"}]"
> attr(,"Content-Type")
> charset
> "text/html" "utf-8"
>
> I can match the result given on the DSTK API's website by using
system(), but doesn't seem like the R-like way of doing something.
>
>> system("curl -d 'Archbishop Huxley'
'http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/text2people'")
> 158 141 141 141
0[{"gender":"u","first_name":"","title":"archbishop","surnames":"Huxley","start_index":0,"end_index":17,"matched_string":"Archbishop
Huxley"}] 17 599 72 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 670
>
> If you want to see some additional information related to this question, I
posted on StackOverflow a few days ago:
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5797688/post-request-using-rcurl
>
> I am working on this R wrapper for the data science toolkit as a way of
illustrating how to make an R package for the Denver RUG and ran into this
problem. Any help to this problem will be greatly appreciated by the Denver
RUG!
>
> Cheers,
> Ryan
>
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