urlread and urlwrite

[Alexander Barth]

John W. Eaton wrote:
> | This function may be useful for the package manager. Like rpm is able to 
> install a package from a
> | web-server (for example: rpm -ihv http://example.com/package.rpm), a 
> similar functionality could be
> | added to pkg.m
> | 
> | I would be glad if this function would be considered for inclusion in 
> octave or octave-forge. If
> | octave-forge turns out to be the appropriate place, I can add it myself, 
> maybe in main/miscellaneous.
> | 
> 
> Yes, I think it would be useful to have this functionality.  Probably
> it would be best to have an interface taht is compatible with the
> urlread and urlwrite functions from Matlab.  Also, for inclusion with
> Octave it would help for the code to match the style of the rest of
> Octave.
> 
> Also, Matlab has a collection of ftp functions.  Does libcurl provide
> the functionality needed to implement those features?  The ftp
> functions available in Matlab are
> 
>  ascii   binary  cd      close   delete  dir
>  ftp     mget    mkdir   mput    rename  rmdir
> 
> jwe
> 

Hi all,

I implemented matlab's urlwrite and urlread functions. I think that those 
octave functions support
all features of the matlab functions except for the support of proxies (I'm not 
behind a proxy so I
won't be able to test proxy support).

In addition, the octave functions return an optional 3rd output argument which 
contains the error
message. Matlab's functions only indicate if an error occurred but without 
telling you what when
wrong. Also, octave's urlwrite and urlread show the progress of the download 
(but this can be disabled).

For compiling the attached source code you need libcurl, its development 
package and curl-config in
your path. A small makefile is also included in the attached tar file.

Cheers,
Alexander

urlwrite.tar.gz
Description: GNU Zip compressed data