Multilingual programming for retrieving web pages
Tower of Babylon
© Lead Image © Maksym Shevchenko, 123RF.com
We show you how to whip up a script that pulls an HTTP document off the web and how to find out which language offers the easiest approach.
Few programming tasks illuminate the differences between commonly used languages as clearly as that of retrieving a web document. When it comes to shell scripts, admins often turn to the curl utility, which transfers the data behind a URL without much ado and sends them to the standard output.
But, what if the URL points to a black hole? Or the server denies access? And what if the server returns a redirect? For example, curl http://google.com does not return the expected HTML page with the search form but just a note that the desired page may be available on www.google.com. Armed with the -L option, however, curl follows the reference and then returns the data from the source it finds there.
What happens with a huge file like a 4K movie containing many gigabytes of data? Will the process exhaust your RAM because it attempts to swallow everything in a single gulp? Does encryption work automatically for an HTTPS URL using the SSL protocol, and does the utility check the server's certificate correctly so that it does not fall victim to a man-in-the-middle attack? Similar to good old curl, popular programming languages offer all of this, although often only as an add-on package and often requiring quirky approaches.
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