POST request using RCurl

With httr, this is just:

library(httr)
r <- POST("http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/text2people", 
  body = "Tim O'Reilly, Archbishop Huxley")
stop_for_status(r)
content(r, "parsed", "application/json")

Generally, in those cases where you're trying to POST something that isn't keyed, you can just assign a dummy key to that value. For example:

> postForm("http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/text2people", a="Archbishop Huxley")
[1] "[{\"gender\":\"u\",\"first_name\":\"\",\"title\":\"archbishop\",\"surnames\":\"Huxley\",\"start_index\":44,\"end_index\":61,\"matched_string\":\"Archbishop Huxley\"},{\"gender\":\"u\",\"first_name\":\"\",\"title\":\"archbishop\",\"surnames\":\"Huxley\",\"start_index\":88,\"end_index\":105,\"matched_string\":\"Archbishop Huxley\"}]"
attr(,"Content-Type")
                charset 
"text/html"     "utf-8" 

Would work the same if I'd used b="Archbishop Huxley", etc.

Enjoy RCurl - it's probably my favorite R package. If you get adventurous, upgrading to ~ libcurl 7.21 exposes some new methods via curl (including SMTP, etc.).

From Duncan Temple Lang on the R-help list:

postForm() is using a different style (or specifically Content-Type) of submitting the form than the curl -d command. Switching the style = 'POST' uses the same type, but at a quick guess, the parameter name 'a' is causing confusion and the result is the empty JSON array - "[]".

A quick workaround is to use curlPerform() directly rather than postForm()

r = dynCurlReader()
curlPerform(postfields = 'Archbishop Huxley', url = 'http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/text2people', verbose = TRUE,
             post = 1L, writefunction = r$update)
r$value()

This yields

[1]
"[{\"gender\":\"u\",\"first_name\":\"\",\"title\":\"archbishop\",\"surnames\":\"Huxley\",\"start_index\":0,\"end_index\":17,\"matched_string\":\"Archbishop
Huxley\"}]"

and you can use fromJSON() to transform it into data in R.