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Making HTTP Requests from Challenges

Background

Often, when creating a challenge, you'll want to make an HTTP request to an external resource to consume an API, add custom logging, or pull down a dataset used in the challenge.

Language Support

Our code runner doesn't have wget or curl in most images, so request capabilities are generally limited beyond language features.

The languages with the best support are:

  • C# (System.Net.Http and Newtonsoft.Json)
  • Dart (HttpClient and jsonDecode)
  • Go (net/http and encoding/json)
  • Node JavaScript (axios or fetch)
  • PHP (file_get_contents)
  • PowerShell (Invoke-RestMethod)
  • Python (requests, urllib, pandas)
  • R (httr, jsonlite)
  • Ruby (net/http)
  • Shell (curl)
  • TypeScript (axios or fetch)

JVM languages support requests but don't currently have a good way to parse JSON at the time of writing. Please ask if you'd like us to add support.

Examples

The Spelling Checker challenge has minimal examples of making HTTP requests in many languages.