== Curb - Libcurl bindings for Ruby

* http://curb.rubyforge.org/
* http://rubyforge.org/projects/curb
* http://github.com/taf2/curb/tree/master

Curb (probably CUrl-RuBy or something) provides Ruby-language bindings for the
libcurl(3), a fully-featured client-side URL transfer library.
cURL and libcurl live at http://curl.haxx.se/ .

Curb is a work-in-progress, and currently only supports libcurl's 'easy' and 'multi' modes.

=== License

Curb is copyright (c)2006 Ross Bamford, and released under the terms of the 
Ruby license. See the LICENSE file for the gory details. 

=== You will need

* A working Ruby installation (1.8+, tested with 1.8.5, 1.8.6, 1.8.7, and 1.9.1)
* A working (lib)curl installation, with development stuff (7.5+, tested with 7.15)
* A sane build environment

=== Installation...

... will usually be as simple as:

  $ gem install curb
  
Or, if you downloaded the archive:  

  $ rake install 

If you have a wierd setup, you might need extconf options. In this case, pass
them like so:

  $ rake install EXTCONF_OPTS='--with-curl-dir=/path/to/libcurl --prefix=/what/ever'
  
Currently, Curb is tested only on GNU/Linux x86 - YMMV on other platforms.
If you do use another platform and experience problems, or if you can 
expand on the above instructions, please get in touch via the mailing
list on Curb's Rubyforge page.

Curb has fairly extensive RDoc comments in the source. You can build the
documentation with:

  $ rake doc

=== Examples

Simple fetch via HTTP:

  c = Curl::Easy.perform("http://www.google.co.uk")
  puts c.body_str

Same thing, more manual:

  c = Curl::Easy.new("http://www.google.co.uk")
  c.perform
  puts c.body_str

Additional config:

  Curl::Easy.perform("http://www.google.co.uk") do |curl| 
    curl.headers["User-Agent"] = "myapp-0.0"
    curl.verbose = true
  end

Same thing, more manual:

  c = Curl::Easy.new("http://www.google.co.uk") do |curl| 
    curl.headers["User-Agent"] = "myapp-0.0"
    curl.verbose = true
  end
  
  c.perform

Supplying custom handlers:

  c = Curl::Easy.new("http://www.google.co.uk")
  
  c.on_body { |data| print(data) }
  c.on_header { |data| print(data) }
  
  c.perform

Reusing Curls:

  c = Curl::Easy.new

  ["http://www.google.co.uk", "http://www.ruby-lang.org/"].map do |url|
    c.url = url
    c.perform
    c.body_str
  end

HTTP POST form:

  c = Curl::Easy.http_post("http://my.rails.box/thing/create",
                           Curl::PostField.content('thing[name]', 'box',
                           Curl::PostField.content('thing[type]', 'storage')

HTTP POST file upload:

  c = Curl::Easy.new("http://my.rails.box/files/upload")
  c.multipart_form_post = true
  c.http_post(Curl::PostField.file('myfile.rb'))

Multi Interface (Basic):
  easy_options = {:follow_location => true}
  multi_options = {:pipeline => true}

  Curl::Multi.get('url1','url2','url3','url4','url5', easy_options, multi_options) do|easy|
    # do something interesting with the easy response
    puts easy.last_effective_url
  end

Multi Interface (Advanced):
  responses = {}
  requests = ["http://www.google.co.uk/", "http://www.ruby-lang.org/"]
  m = Curl::Multi.new
  # add a few easy handles
  requests.each do |url|
    responses[url] = ""
    c = Curl::Easy.new(url) do|curl|
      curl.follow_location = true
      curl.on_body{|data| responses[url] << data; data.size }
    end
    m.add(c)
  end

  m.perform do
    puts "idling... can do some work here, including add new requests"
  end

  requests.each do|url|
    puts responses[url]
  end