[wp-hackers] WP HTTP Client

[Jacob Santos]

Ryan McCue wrote:
> Eric Marden wrote:
>   
>> I think I remember seeing a post come across the list about the 'best'
>> way to make HTTP calls (get/post) inside of a wordpress plugin, and
>> that some said there was a class or set of functions for that. Are we
>> talking about wp-includes/class-snoopy.php or is there a better way?
>>     
>
> Jacob Santos' work on it is wp-includes/http.php in trunk (and slated
> for 2.7).
>
> Thanks,
> Ryan M.
>   

Eric,

I had hoped to create something that would totally own Snoopy, but 
whatever, the http.php file includes three functions for making HTTP 
requests. All of them handle redirection 301, all of them also handle 
HTTP 1.1 content chunk encoding (some hosts insist on sending chunk 
encoding when HTTP 1.0 requests are made, the bastards!).

I plan on writing a codex page on how to use the functions but 
basically, you

wp_remote_request("http://www.wordpress.org"); <--- This is used to test 
for redirection, if you get nothing, then redirection failed!

There are additional arguments you can set for the second parameter. I 
think I'll save that for the codex page.

wp_remote_get("http://wordpress.org"); <---- This sends the request as a 
GET.
wp_remote_post("http://wordpress.org", array( 'body' => 
array('something' => 'else') )); <--- This sends the request as a POST.

Yeah, if you send the body as an array, it will be automatically url 
encoded and the correct header set.

It does a lot for you to make it extremely easy and standard throughout 
the transports used. This also means that there will be bugs and I 
strongly encourage people to test the HTTP API as much as possible. 
There might be a bug in one transport that isn't in the other 
transports. The good news is that most of the transports have been 
battle tested for about two weeks, so the majority of people shouldn't 
have problems, the bad news is that if you have problems you'll probably 
be SOL.

When I say you, I don't mean you, I mean the person who experiences 
problems when 2.7 is released. However, the probably of that happening 
goes down with the more people using it and the longer people use it the 
more stable it will be. With five transports, it gets pretty tricky from 
this point. I would suggest installing the pecl HTTP extension, if you 
don't already have it, it appears to be the most stable.

Jacob Santos