POST request using RCurl

Question

As a way of exploring how to make a package in R for the Denver RUG, I decided that it would be a fun little project to write an R wrapper around the datasciencetoolkit API.

Answer 1

Generally, in those cases where you're trying to POST something that isn't keyed, you can just assign a dummy key to that value. For example:

> postForm("http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/text2people", 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" 

Would work the same if I'd used b="Archbishop Huxley", etc.

Enjoy RCurl - it's probably my favorite R package. If you get adventurous, upgrading to ~ libcurl 7.21 exposes some new methods via curl (including SMTP, etc.).