Post request using cookies with cURL, RCurl and httr

httr automatically preserves cookies across calls to the same site, as illustrated by these two calls to http://httpbin.org

GET("http://httpbin.org/cookies/set?a=1")# Response [http://httpbin.org/cookies]#   Status: 200#   Content-type: application/json# {#    "cookies": {#     "a": "1"#   }# } GET("http://httpbin.org/cookies")# Response [http://httpbin.org/cookies]#   Status: 200#   Content-type: application/json# {#   "cookies": {#     "a": "1"#   }# } 

Perhaps the problem is that you're sending your data as application/x-www-form-urlencoded, but the default in httr is multipart/form-data, so use multipart = FALSE in your POST call.

Based on Juba suggestion, here is a working RCurl template.

The code emulates a browser behaviour, as it:

1. retrieves cookies on a login screen and
2. reuses them on the following page requests containing the actual data.

### RCurl login and browse private pages ###library("RCurl")loginurl ="http=//www.*****"mainurl  ="http=//www.*****"agent    ="Mozilla/5.0"#User account data and other login parspars=list(     RURL="http=//www.*****",     Username="*****",     Password="*****")#RCurl pars     curl = getCurlHandle()curlSetOpt(cookiejar="cookiesk.txt",  useragent = agent, followlocation = TRUE, curl=curl)#or simply#curlSetOpt(cookiejar="", useragent = agent, followlocation = TRUE, curl=curl)#post login formweb=postForm(loginurl, .params = pars, curl=curl)#go to main url with real dataweb=getURL(mainurl, curl=curl)#parse/print content of web#..... etc. etc.#This has the side effect of saving cookie data to the cookiejar file rm(curl)gc()

Here is a way to create a post request, keep and reuse the resulting cookies with RCurl, for example to get web pages when authentication is required :

library(RCurl)curl <- getCurlHandle()curlSetOpt(cookiejar="/tmp/cookies.txt", curl=curl)postForm("http://example.com/login", login="mylogin", passwd="mypasswd", curl=curl)getURL("http://example.com/anotherpage", curl=curl)