Google Spreadsheets: Is there a HTTP request function?

Question

Does Google Spreadsheets have a cell function that lets me do HTTP requests like

POST the contents of this cell to http://www.mysite.com/input or

GET the XML at http://www.mysite.com/feed.xml

?

Or can I write a custom function that does so? Or is there a more conventional way of doing what I want to do? (using Spreadsheets to talk to REST APIs)

Answer 1

For getting contents of a cell to your website use the Google Spreadsheet API. Here you can find a simple example of retrieving JSON feeds from Spreadsheets Data API: https://developers.google.com/gdata/samples/spreadsheet_sample

Since this link may be moved due goole updates here's a copy of the script element:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/feed/key/worksheet/public/basic?alt=json-in-script&callback=myFunc

... where feed is the type of feed, key is the key of the spreadsheet you want to retrieve, the worksheet is the positional or unique identifier of the worksheet, and myFunc is the name of your callback function that is passed the JSON object.

For getting XML from a web ressource use the function: IMPORTXML(URL; XPath) e.g. importXML("http://www.example.com/feed.xml";"/path/inXML")