Simple HTTP Client

Wraps Apache HttpClient 4.0 to provide an easy to use Scala API. Java users have some benefits as well.

Copyright © 2009, Erkki Lindpere
All rights reserved.

This software is distributed under the MIT license. See the file License.txt for the full text.

The project name shttpc is pronounced like ShittyPC.

A Maven repository at villane.org contains both sources and binaries.

Maven note: you will have to add SHTTPC’s optional Maven dependencies to your own POM, they won’t get transitively resolved (they are marked optional because it’s annoying to transitively get a bunch of libraries that you don’t need)

Usage examples (Scala)

GET with params Map, comprehensions with NekoHTML parsed to Scala’s XML Nodes

import org.villane.shttpc._

object MetacriticTest {
  val http = new Http

  case class Result(name: String, url: String, score: Int)
  
  def feelingLucky(query: String) = {
    val html = http.get("http://www.metacritic.com/search/process" ? Map(
      "sort" -> "relevance",
      "termtype" -> "all",
      "ts" -> query,
      "ty" -> "0"
    )).asHtml

    val res = for {
      div <- html \ "body" \ "div"
      if (div \ "@id" == "pagecontainer")
      col <- div \ "div" \ "table" \ "tbody" \ "tr" \ "td"
      if (col \ "@id" == "rightcolumn")
      p <- col \ "p"
      if (p.text.startsWith("1."))
    } yield p

    Result(res \ "a" text, res \ "a" \ "@href" text, (res \ "span" text).toInt)
  }

  def main(sgra: Array[String]) = {
    println(feelingLucky("Brutal Legend").score)
  }
}

Alternate comprehension with SHTTPC’s XPath support

Note that XPath support is very limited, basically only expressions like the one below are supported.

	import BetterXPath._
    val res = for {
      p <- html / "body/div[@id='pagecontainer']/div/table/tbody/tr/td[@id='rightcolumn']/p"
      if (p.text.startsWith("1."))
    } yield p

Usage Examples (Java)

Similar Example to the above, but in Java.

import org.villane.shttpc.Http;
import org.villane.shttpc.IterableNodeList;
import org.villane.shttpc.SimpleHttpResponse;
import org.villane.shttpc.SimpleXPath;
import org.w3c.dom.Document;
import org.w3c.dom.Node;

public class MetacriticTestJava {

	public static class Result {
		public final String name;
		public final String url;
		public final Integer score;

		public Result(String name, String url, Integer score) {
			this.name = name;
			this.url = url;
			this.score = score;
		}
	}

	public static Result feelingLucky(String query) throws Exception {
		Http http = new Http();
		SimpleHttpResponse response = http.get(	"http://www.metacritic.com/search/process"
				+ "?sort=relevance&termtype=all&ts={}&ty=0", query);
		Document html = response.asDomHtml();
		IterableNodeList ps = SimpleXPath.evalNodeList(html,
				"/HTML/BODY/DIV[@id='pagecontainer']/DIV/TABLE/TBODY/TR/TD[@id='rightcolumn']/P");
		Node p = null;
		for (Node node : ps) {
			if (node.getTextContent().startsWith("1.")) {
				p = node;
				break;
			}
		}
		return new Result(
				SimpleXPath.evalNode(p, "A").getTextContent(),
				SimpleXPath.evalString(p, "A/@href"),
				SimpleXPath.evalNumber(p, "SPAN/text()").intValue()
		);
	}

	public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
		System.out.println(feelingLucky("Brutal Legend").score);
	}
}