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Showing posts from December, 2014

Accessing web services with cURL

ChEMBL web services are really friendly. We provide live online documentation , support for CORS and JSONP techniques to support web developers in creating their own web widgets. For Python developers, we provide dedicated client library as well as examples using the client and well known requests library in a form of ipython notebook . There are also examples for Java and Perl, you can find it here . But this is nothing for real UNIX/Linux hackers. Real hackers use cURL . And there is a good reason to do so. cURL comes preinstalled on many Linux distributions as well as OSX. It follows Unix philosophy and can be joined with other tools using pipes . Finally, it can be used inside bash scripts which is very useful for automating tasks. Unfortunately first experiences with cURL can be frustrating. For example, after studying cURL manual pages , one may think that following will return set of compounds in json format: But the result is quite dissapointing... The reason is