[R] RCurl cookiejar

[Hadley Wickham]

Hi Earl,

Have you read the libCurl documentation for CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR? :

Pass a file name as char *, zero terminated. This will make libcurl
write all internally known cookies to the specified file when
curl_easy_cleanup(3)is called. If no cookies are known, no file will
be created. Specify "-" to instead have the cookies written to stdout.
Using this option also enables cookies for this session, so if you for
example follow a location it will make matching cookies get sent
accordingly.

If the cookie jar file can't be created or written to (when the
curl_easy_cleanup(3) is called), libcurl will not and cannot report an
error for this. UsingCURLOPT_VERBOSE or CURLOPT_DEBUGFUNCTION will get
a warning to display, but that is the only visible feedback you get
about this possibly lethal situation.



So it may be that Rcurl doesn't call curl_easy_cleanup, no cookies are
known (seems unlikely), or curl can't create the file (so try adding
the verbose config)

Hadley

On Sun, Aug 25, 2013 at 1:01 AM, Earl Brown <ekbrown at k-state.edu> wrote:
> R-helpers,
>
> When I use cURL in the Terminal:
>
> curl --cookie-jar cookie.txt --url "http://corpusdelespanol.org/x.asp" --user-agent "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:16.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/23.0" --location --include
>
> a cookie file "cookie.txt" is saved to my working directory. However, when I try what I think is the equivalent command R with RCurl:
>
> ch <- getCurlHandle(followlocation = T, header = T, useragent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:16.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/23.0")
> getURL(url = "http://www.corpusdelespanol.org/x.asp", cookiejar = "cookie.txt", curl = ch)
>
> no cookie file is saved.
>
> What am I missing to reproduce in RCurl what I'm successfully doing in the Terminal?
>
> Thank you for your time and help. Earl Brown
>
> -----
> Earl K. Brown, PhD
> Assistant Professor of Spanish Linguistics
> Advisor, TEFL MA Program
> Department of Modern Languages
> Kansas State University
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.



-- 
Chief Scientist, RStudio
http://had.co.nz/