How do I get the contents of an http request in Ruby?

Question

In PHP I can do this:

$request = "http://www.example.com/someData";
$response = file_get_contents($request);

How would I do the same thing in Ruby (or some Rails method?)

I've been googling for a half an hour and coming up completely short.

Answer 1

In your view try

<%= request.inspect %>

Answer 2

Net::HTTP.get(URI.parse('http://www.example.com/index.html'))

Not sure why I didn't find this earlier. Unless there's an better way, I'm going with this!

Answer 3

The standard library package open-uri is what you're after:

require 'open-uri'
contents = open('http://www.example.com') {|io| io.read}
# or
contents = URI.parse('http://www.example.com').read