Lua socket.http sink parameter

Question

I'm trying to communicate with my servers from Lua to authenticate a user. This is what my request function looks like:

function http.send(url)
    local req = require("socket.http")
    local b, c, h = req.request{
        url = url,
        redirect = true
    }
    return b
end

However, I noticed that the data is discarded because I did not provide the sink parameter. I want to be able to return the downloaded data as a whole string, not download to a file/table. How would I go about this?

Answer 1

You can use ltn12.sink.table to collect the results into a given table piece by piece. Then you can use table.concat to get the resulting string.

Example of use from the documentation of ltn12.sink:

-- load needed modules
local http = require("socket.http")
local ltn12 = require("ltn12")

-- a simplified http.get function
function http.get(u)
  local t = {}
  local status, code, headers = http.request{
    url = u,
    sink = ltn12.sink.table(t)
  }
  return table.concat(t), headers, code
end