Parsing multipart/form-data with webutils

November 1, 2014

As part of a larger effort to clean up and rewrite the opencpu package, some of the more general utilities will be moved into a new, separate package called webutils. The first release of webutils is now on CRAN.

The package contains a simple http request body parser that supports application/x-www-form-urlencoded, multipart/form-data, and application/json. The multipart parser is written in pure R but surprisingly fast. Furthermore, two demo functions are included that illustrate how to host and parse simple HTML forms (with file uploads) using either rhttpd or httpuv.

library(webutils)
demo_rhttpd()
demo_httpuv()

Nothing ground breaking in a time of interactive graphics and restful data science as a service, but sometimes all you need is a simple form. I had a hard time finding a decent multipart parser for R, and this one does the job quite nicely.