which R package provides functionality similar to pythons urllib

Question

My task is to port a snipped of python code which uses python urllib to R. This is the entire python code:

import urllib.parse
import urllib.request

url = "https://www.uniprot.org/uploadlists/"

params = {
  "from": "ACC+ID",
  "to": "ENSEMBL_ID",
  "format": "tab",
  "query": "P40925 P40926 O43175 Q9UM73 P97793"
}

data = urllib.parse.urlencode(params)
data = data.encode("utf-8")
req = urllib.request.Request(url, data)
with urllib.request.urlopen(req) as f:
  response = f.read()
print(response.decode("utf-8"))

I am not to keen to use paste and paste0 to build url's manually in R. What I did find is the R urltools package. But it does not help me with url-encoding the data as urllib.parse.urlencode does.

What would be the R package to use to re-implement the python code? Or should I use reticulate?

Thank you

Answer 1

I think httr should get the job done:

url <- "https://www.uniprot.org/uploadlists/"

params = list(
  from = "ACC+ID",
  to = "ENSEMBL_ID",
  format = "tab",
  query = "P40925 P40926 O43175 Q9UM73 P97793"
)

r <- httr::POST(url, body = params, encode = "form")
cat(httr::content(r))
#> No encoding supplied: defaulting to UTF-8.
#> From To
#> P40925   ENSG00000014641
#> P40926   ENSG00000146701
#> O43175   ENSG00000092621
#> Q9UM73   ENSG00000171094
#> P97793   ENSMUSG00000055471

^{Created on 2019-09-02 by the reprex package (v0.3.0.9000)}