>>>>> Gábor Csárdi
>>>>> on Tue, 4 Dec 2018 21:23:20 +0000 writes:
> The patch below adds support for custom HTTP headers in
> download.file() and url().
> My main motivation for this is performing basic http
> authentication. Some web sites do not support embedding
> the credentials into the URI itself, they only work if the
> username and password are sent in the HTTP headers. In
> fact specifying the username and password in the URI has
> been
>
deprecated.(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_access_authentication#URL_encoding)
> Unfortunately this means that download.file() and url()
> cannot access these password protected URLs. This patch fixes that.
Dear Gábor,
thank you very much for your valuable contribution!
R core members have been busy but now have reviewed your code
and liked it, and I have committed it to R-devel aka "the trunk"
(svn rev 75890).
So this should become part of the R x.y.0 release around April 2019.
Thanking you once more ...
merry Christmas and happy holidays !
Martin
> I am happy to update the patch as needed.
> Details:
> * This patch adds supports for custom HTTP headers in download.file() and
url().
> * They both get a headers = NULL argument.
> * This is implemented for the internal, wininet and libcurl methods.
> * For other methods headers is silently ignored.
> * For non-HTTP URLs headers is silently ignored.
> * The headers argument must be a named character vector without NAs, or
NULL.
> * If headers is not named or it contains NAs, or the names contain
> NAs, an error is thrown.
> * For download.file() the method is chosen in R, and we a character
> vector to C for libcurl and a collapsed string constant for internal
> and wininet.
> * For url() the method is only chosen in C, so we pass both a string
> vector and the collapsed string vector to C. This is simpler than
> collapsing in C.
> * It is not possible to specify headers for file(), even though it handles
URLs.
> * The user agent (coming from the HTTPUserAgent options), will the the
> first header, for the methods that need it together with the other
> headers.
> * We don't check for duplicate headers, just pass to the methods as
> the user specified them.
> * We test all methods.
> * We have run the tests on macOS, Debian Linux and Windows 2016 Server.
>
> You can also browse the changes here:
> https://github.com/gaborcsardi/r-source/pull/3/files
> You can also download the diff below from
> https://github.com/gaborcsardi/r-source/pull/3.diff
>
> Best,
> Gabor
[....................]
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