NAME
hget, hpost, webpaste, urlencode – retrieve, post to a web page corresponding to a url

SYNOPSIS
hget [ –l | –o file ] [ –p body | –P ] [ –r header ] [ –m method ] [ –b baseurl ] url

hpost [ –l ] [ –g action | –p action | –m action ] [ –r header ] [ –u ] url [ name:value | name@file ] ...

webpaste [ file ]

urlencode [ –d ] [ file ]

DESCRIPTION
Hget retrieves the web page specified by the URL url and writes it, absent the –l and –o options, to standard output.

The url can be a relative path like ../index.html if a absolute baseurl was specified with the –b option.

If url is of type HTTP and the –p or –P options are specified, then a HTTP POST is performed. With –p the data to be posted is provided by the body argument as a string or alternatively with –P read from standard input.

The –l option causes hget and hpost to print the location URL from the transaction response instead of retrieving the body data. This is useful for HTTP POST transactions that redirect to a URL containing the posted data so we wont refetch the data we just uploaded to the site.

The –o option is used to keep a local file in sync with a web page. If the web page has been modified later than the file, it is copied into the file. If the file is up to date but incomplete, hget will fetch the missing bytes.

Option –r sends an arbitrary HTTP header. The –r flag can be repeated to send multiple headers.

Option –m overrides the HTTP method used for the request.

Hpost retrieves the web page specified by the URL url, parses its HTML for form data, then prints rc(1) commands to submit the forms with default field values. If an action URL is provided with the –g, –p or –m flags, then hget is invoked to execute the transaction submitting the form data.

The –g and –p flags set the form method to GET and POST, respectively. The –m flag sets the form method to POST and its enctype to multipart/form–data. In all cases, the target relative form action URL is set to action.

The –u flag sets the target URL to url. As the url parameter is always required, the –u flag can be omitted when url follows directly after the last option if any.

The remaining arguments of the form name:value are interpreted as text form field names and values to be submitted. An argument of the form name@file is interpreted as a file upload, with the information following the @ symbol treated as the file name. For multipart/form–data uploads (see –m flag), the file has to be seekable as file(1) is invoked to determine its mime type.

Webpaste uploads the contents either of its standard input or file to the pastebin website http://okturing.com and then prints a URL where the contents may be retrieved.

Urlencode is a helper program to URL encode and decode files. The –d flag, instead of encode, decodes URL encoded file. If no file is given, standard input is read. The resulting data is written to standard output.

EXAMPLES
Download a file from the web.
% hget http://9front.org/img/nix–on.jpg >/tmp/nix–on.jpg

Retrieve the commands needed to submit a form, which may then be edited and sent.
% hpost http://p.intma.in
hpost –u http://p.intma.in –p paste.cgi text:

Manually specify fields to be sent to a given url.
% hpost –u http://p.intma.in –p paste.cgi text:'test post'

Upload a file, print the resulting URL
% hpost –l http://i.intma.in file@/tmp/screen.png | rc

Upload the output of ns(1) to http://okturing.com
% ns | webpaste

SOURCE
/rc/bin/hget
/rc/bin/hpost
/rc/bin/webpaste
/sys/src/cmd/urlencode.c

SEE ALSO
webfs(4), ftpfs(4), file(1)

DIAGNOSTICS
Hget, hpost and webpaste require webfs(4) service mounted on /mnt/web to work.

HISTORY
Hget first appeared in Plan 9 from Bell Labs. It was rewritten as an rc script for 9front (January, 2012). Hpost and urlencode first appeared in 9front (October, 2012). Webpaste first appeared in 9front (September, 2013).