Help, how to download a binary file through Net::HTTP

[Eric Luo]

Hi,
I'm new to Ruby. I want to download a binary file by Net::HTTP or other
ways. I mimic the
what's been done in the "Programming Ruby". But It failed. I want to know
what the
right way is!
Thanks

[Mark Hubbart]

The quick way, if you just want the file contents:

require 'net/http'
data = Net::HTTP.get(URI.parse('http://www.google.com/index.html'))

.. data now has the contents of the file. Then there's the slightly
more involved way, which lets you reuse the http connection (if you
want to fetch more than one file), and get the headers, too:

google = Net::HTTP.new('www.google.com', 80)
headers, data = google.get 'index.html'

Net::HTTP#get (not Net::HTTP.get) returns an array, the first part is
the header info, the second is the file data.

hth,
Mark

[Erik Veenstra]

You can't download a file. But you can download the contents of
a file and write to a file yourself. And the latter might be a
problem if you open the file with "w" instead of "wb" for
binary files.

gegroet,
Erik V. (http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/)

[Martin DeMello]

Erik Veenstra <p...@erikveen.dds.nl> wrote:
> > I'm new to Ruby. I want to download a binary file by
> > Net::HTTP or other ways. I mimic the what's been done in the
> > "Programming Ruby". But It failed. I want to know what the
> > right way is!
>
> You can't download a file. But you can download the contents of
> a file and write to a file yourself. And the latter might be a
> problem if you open the file with "w" instead of "wb" for
> binary files.

A #download(source, dest) might not be such a bad addition to the API,
at that.

martin