There are currently three ways to retrieve the contents of a request:
as a raw object (as = "raw"), as a character vector,
(as = "text"), and as parsed into an R object where possible,
(as = "parsed"). If as is not specified, content
does its best to guess which output is most appropriate.
Usage
content(x, as = NULL, type = NULL, encoding = NULL, ...)
Arguments
x
request object
as
desired type of output: raw, text or
parsed. content attempts to automatically figure out
which one is most appropriate, based on the content-type.
For text, overrides the charset or the Latin1 (ISO-8859-1)
default, if you know that the server is returning the incorrect encoding
as the charset in the content-type. Use for text and parsed outputs.
...
Other parameters parsed on to the parsing functions, if
as = "parsed"
Details
content currently knows about the following mime types:
text/html: read_html
text/xml: read_xml
text/csv: read_csv
text/tab-separated-values: read_tsv
application/json: fromJSON
application/x-www-form-urlencoded: parse_query
image/jpeg: readJPEG
image/png: readPNG
as = "parsed" is provided as a convenience only: if the type you
are trying to parse is not available, use as = "text" and parse
yourself.
Value
For "raw", a raw vector.
For "text", a character vector of length 1. The character vector is always
re-encoded to UTF-8. If this encoding fails (usually because the page
declares an incorrect encoding), content() will return NA.
For "auto", a parsed R object.
WARNING
When using content() in a package, DO NOT use on as = "parsed".
Instead, check the mime-type is what you expect, and then parse yourself.
This is safer, as you will fail informatively if the API changes, and
you will protect yourself against changes to httr.
See Also
Other response methods: http_error,
http_status, response,
stop_for_status
Examples
r <- POST("http://httpbin.org/post", body = list(a = 1, b = 2))
content(r) # automatically parses JSON
cat(content(r, "text"), "\n") # text content
content(r, "raw") # raw bytes from server
rlogo <- content(GET("http://cran.r-project.org/Rlogo.jpg"))
plot(0:1, 0:1, type = "n")
rasterImage(rlogo, 0, 0, 1, 1)