http, a command bundled into Tcl, is a client-side implementation of the HTTP/1.1 protocol.

Documentation  edit

official reference

Commands  edit

[1](https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/24061)

Performs an HTTP transaction.

History  edit

As of version X, http supports HTTP 1.1.

Simple Examples  edit

Playing HTTP, by Richard Suchenwirth

See Also  edit

An HTTP robot in Tcl

Download file via HTTP

Downloading a File over HTTP

File Upload with tcl's http

Google Translation via http Module

http authentication

isn't difficult.

HTML to DOM via http/htmlparse/struct::tree packages

cookies

also easy.

TclCurl

a higher-level API than http

w3m

a higher-level API than http

Parallel Geturl

a package built on of http to download a large number of urls in an efficient, parallel manner.

Voicent Telephone Call Interface

an HTTP client package for making telephone calls from your Tcl/Tk programs using Voicent Gateway. It uses HTTP POST to communication with the gateway. [2].

Official library of extensions

single command http fetcher

Simple HTTP Authentication Wrapper for http::geturl RFC 2617

Tcl chatroom snaphost history (2)

Tclers Chat Tk GUI

An HTTP robot in Tcl

Getting stock quotes over the internet

Uploading files to Flickr

Downloading a File over HTTP

HTTPS

TclSOAP & SSL -- Can I reuse connections?, comp.lang.tcl, 2001-11-28

a deep and productive discussion of keep-alive, certificates, other HTTP 1.1 aspects, and much more. Pat summarized it in http://tclsoap.sourceforge.net/http.html

Web Site Status

A simple tool to determine the status of a web site: Type a URL in the "Web Site:" text field, then press return or click the "Get Status" button. The HTTP status, code, filesize (in bytes) and raw HTML output will be displayed for the requested resource. Bookmarks can be stored in a file called 'status-bookmarks.txt'. The file should reside in the same directory as this application.

srmlite

a lightweight implementation of Storage Resource Management (SRM) interface for POSIX-compliant file systems. XOTcl is used for implementing high-level logic and for gluing together several technologies such as Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI), HTTP, XML and SOAP.

Synopsis  edit

http::config ?options?

http::geturl url ?options?

http::formatQuery key value ?key value ...?

http::reset token ?why?

http::wait token

http::data token

http::error token

http::status token

http::code token

http::ncode token

http::size token

http::meta token

http::cleanup token

http::register proto port command

http::unregister proto

Documentation  edit

official reference

Versions and Forks  edit

Version 2.8.5, with full HTTP/1.1 support, is distributed with Tcl 8.6.

Version 2.7, with partial HTTP/1.1 support, is distributed with Tcl 8.5.2.

Version 2.5.3 is distributed with Tcl 8.4.18.

The TclSOAP project also contains a distribution of a proposed version 2.5 (with some http 1.1 support), and tclvfs extends that to a proposed version 2.6 (with some webdav support) (merged into the tclsoap projects version (2003-06-23)). However, versions 2.5/2.6 seem to have introduced at least one bug (reported against tclsoap on sourceforge).

Description  edit

::http::size is the number of bytes of HTML that geturl has returned. geturl -validate 1 returns the metadata about the page, and since no html has been retrieved, ::http::size returns 0. In this case $state(totalsize) can be used.

One nice feature of the http package is the support of different http transport protocols via the command:

::http::register proto port command

The initial setting for http itself is as if the following command were issued:

::http::register http 80 ::socket

This can be expanded for HTTPS with the tls package:

package require tls
::http::register https 443 ::tls::socket

For websites that have disabled support for SSL, including version 3, the following should work:

::http::register https 443 [list ::tls::socket -tls1 1]

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It is also possible to overwrite the normal http transport protocol. For example, to get support for multiple internet/ethernet interfaces in a server that has more than one network card or uses aliased IP addresses ([3]), register another version of http:

set myIP 192.168.10.1
::http::register http 80 [list ::socket -myaddr $myIP]

TR: which just expands the initial behaviour.

A POST Request  edit

Silas: Here is probably the easiest example about how to POST HTTP data using the http package:

package require http
set url <your url comes here>
::http::geturl $url -query [::http::formatQuery field1 value1 field2 value2 field3 value3]

---

David Welton gives examples of POSTing HTTP data (that is, use of -query) in [4], comp.lang.tcl, 2002-01-18

Examples  edit

RS: Minimal downloader to stdout:

package require http
puts [http::data [http::geturl [lindex $argv 0]]]

Bruce Hartweg offers this (slightly paraphrased) minimal to-file version:

package require http
http::geturl $theURL -channel [open $theFile w]

along with observations that a more robust version will check for redirects, close channels, http::cleanup, ...

---

DKF: To get the title of a webpage, use this:

package require http
set token [http::geturl $theURL]
regexp {(?i)<title>([^<>]+)} [http::data $token] -> title
http::cleanup $token
puts "Title was \"$title\""

If you're doing more than getting the title, use tdom and not [regexp] for the parsing...

MJ: With tdom this becomes:

package require http
package require tdom
set token [http::geturl $theURL]
set doc [dom parse [http::data $token]] 
set title [[$doc selectNodes {/html/head/title}] asText]
$doc delete
http::cleanup $token
puts "Title was \"$title\""

---

A sample of catching an error when attempting to get a WWW page:

proc t url {
    if {[catch {set tok [::http::geturl $url]} msg]} {
        puts "oops: $msg"
    } else {
        return $tok
    }
    puts leaving
}

---

DGP: It's a simple thing, but I've found use of Tcl's http package the simplest way to discover what Content-Type an HTTP server is sending back with the resource.

RS: me too, when playing HTTP

A Cross-Posting Blog Client  edit

tonytraductor: I've used http to build a crossposting blog client (see http://tonyb.us/xpost) that posts to wordpress, livejournal, tumblr, friendica, and others.

An example, send a post to tumblr:

# where .txt.txt is a text widget,
# tags, title and other parameters set with tk::entry widgets in the gui
# post to tumblr
proc tbpost {} {

set ptext [.txt.txt get 1.0 {end -1c}]

set login [::http::formatQuery mode login user $::email password $::tpswd ]
set log [http::geturl http://www.tumblr.com/api/authenticate -query $login]
    
set post [http::formatQuery mode postevent auth_method clear email $::email password $::tpswd type regular generator Xpostulate tags $::tags title $::subject body $ptext]

set dopost [http::geturl http://www.tumblr.com/api/write -query $post]
set mymeta [http::meta $dopost]
set mystat [http::status $dopost]
set length [http::size $dopost]

toplevel .rsp 
wm title .rsp "Post Status"
grid [tk::label .rsp.lbl -text "Tumblr says: $mystat\nPost length: $length"]
grid [tk::button .rsp.view -text "View Journal" -command {
    set turl "http://$::tname.tumblr.com"
    exec $::brow $turl &
}]\
[tk::button .rsp.ok -text "DONE" -command {destroy .rsp}]

}

Today I'm trying to get it working with posterous, however, and having difficulty.

Restarting A Download  edit

LES: is not superstitious and asks a question on 2004-08-13: What if the download is too large? How is it possible to... er... "cache" the download, i.e. save part of the stream and free up memory?

schlenk: The http geturl method has various options for this special case. Either you give a channel, so the data is written directly to a file for example, or you register a special progress callback to deal with the situation.

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Peter Newman 2004-03-08 : Resuming? Does anyone know if it's possible to resume (MP3 downloads) with [http]. And if so, how? And if it's not possible to resume with http, could you let me know that too. (So I don't have to waste time on a lost cause.) Thanks.

schlenk: It is possible if the http server supports range requests and you know the length of the file from the content length headers. You just need to add the appropriate HTTP header fields when doing the request, see the RFC 2616 3.12 [5].

Proxy Handling  edit

Identification and handling of proxies can be a pain when using the http package so I'm trying to write a package to handle as much of this as possible - see autoproxy

Blocking Behaviour when Resolving a Host Addresss  edit

Complaint: http blocks while resolving non-existent and disconnected server.

DGP: This complaint maps to the complaint that [socket] blocks in the form [socket $host $port] when $host does not exist/respond, even when the -async option is used. This basically further maps into a complaint that gethostbyname() blocks. Other C programs apparently have non-blocking solutions for this. We should discover what those solutions are and see if the [socket] implementation can make use of them. Andreas Kupries' memory is that we collectively decided the best solution is "to have the core spawn a helper thread to process (and wait for) gethostbyname() while the rest of the core goes on crunching."

Darren New observes that gethostbyname() can't be trusted to be thread-safe ...

NOTE: (hint) I don't see this problem with socket reported as a bug at SF.

TV: It's been a while for me, but isn't that inet function in fact opening a (maybe udp) socket to a DNS, which could be select()-able on decent systems?

nl: until this will be fixed you can use the tcllib::dns package to do the dns lookup and then http to the ip (note that this have some implications such as assuming that your DNS host responds and sending a wrong Host header by the http lib, but it is usually better then having your application hang on a bad dns entry).

PT 2003-06-23: This all assumes that DNS is what is being used. However, there are various ways to resolve hostnames and the local C library resolver knows how to handle them according to local configuration. Maybe we are using a hosts file, maybe we have NIS. It is unfortunately not as simple as this appears - otherwise we'd have fixed it. Ultimately using an external process to do the lookups ala netscape's resolver proxy is likely the only way to avoid this delay.

TV: A separate process would leave you with the delay, which is when you don't have the answer to the query readily available, wait for better alternatives or needed correction, or until your connections to the informing party are no longer cluttered or broken, but at least you could do something else in the meanwhile. A major normal reason for having processes or threads in the context of communication pacing things.

DKF: A separate process would let you do other things while the delay was happening. You could even keep a pool of helper processes around and use them round-robin fashion.

Bug: Errors in Callback Disappear  edit

How can you catch an error in a callback? e.g., if I call

http::geturl $url -command somecommand

any errors raised in somecommand just vanish instead of being passed to bgerror as I expect.

PYK 2016-04-03: Yes, http::Finish does swallow errors in the -command if an error is already being propagated. The whole http module needs a little redesigning. In the meantime, the callback command can be "liberated" with something like this:

http::geturl $url -command [list after idle some_command]

HolgerJ 2016-04-23: Could the error I am encountering be related to this?

::http::cleanup $token
::thread::release

Error from thread tid0x7f80f6893700
can not find channel named "sock7f80f0178c50"
    while executing
"eof $sock"

As soon as I put a after 500 between the two statements, the error doesn't show. Could it be that the cleanup is being overtaken by the release, so that the cleanup cannot find the $sock anymore?

pyk 2016-04-23: Do these lines appear in a -command script?

Website Up?  edit

Here is some code recently mentioned on news:comp.lang.tcl for querying whether a site is alive.

if {$argc == 0} {
    set site http://purl.org/thecliff/tcl/wiki/
} else {
    set site [lindex $argv 0]
}

package require http 2.3

# this proc contributed by [Donal Fellows]
proc geturl_followRedirects {url args} {
    while 1 {
        set token [eval [list http::geturl $url] $args]
        switch -glob [http::ncode $token] {
            30[1237] {### redirect - see below ###}
            default  {return $token}
        }
        upvar #0 $token state
        array set meta [set ${token}(meta)]
        if {![info exists meta(Location)]} {
           return $token
        }
        set url $meta(Location)
        unset meta
    }
}

set token [geturl_followRedirects $site -validate 1]
if {[regexp -nocase ok [::http::code $token]]} {
    puts "$site is alive"
} else {
    puts "$site is dead: [::http::code $token]"
}
::http::cleanup $token

HaO 2013-05-02: IMHO it would be more secure to limit the redirections to 5.

Backwards Incompatibility: http-2.7  edit

Tcl/Tk 8.5.2 Release Candidates Options (new behaviour with http -handler), comp.lang.tcl, 2008-03-28: discusses a problem with http version 2.7.

Misc  edit

Show Dead forks

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Show Odd behaviour in an unusual context

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Show  http(s) Link Verification

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oehhar - 2017-08-31 12:19:29

Show Bug: code value "HTTP/1.1 100 Continue"

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