We’re very pleased to announce the release of httr 0.3. httr makes it easy to work with modern web apis so that you can work with web data almost as easily as local data. For example, this code shows how might find the most recently asked question about R on stackoverflow:

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# install.packages("httr")
library(httr)

# Find the most recent R questions on stackoverflow
r <- GET(
  "http://api.stackexchange.com",
  path = "questions",
  query = list(
    site = "stackoverflow.com",
    tagged = "r"
  )
)

# Check the request succeeded
stop_for_status(r)

# Automatically parse the json output
questions <- content(r)
questions$items[[1]]$title
#> [1] "Remove NAs from data frame without deleting entire rows/columns"

httr 0.3 recieved a major overhaul to OAuth support. OAuth is a modern standard for authentication used when you want to allow a service (i.e R package) access to your account on a website. This version of httr provides an improved initial authentication experience and supports caching so that you only need to authenticate once per project. A big thanks goes to Craig Citro (Google) who contributed a lot of code and ideas to make this possible.

httr 0.3 also includes many other bug fixes and minor improvements. You can read about these in the github release notes .