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

Using the net/http library as shown:

require 'net/http'

response = Net::HTTP.get_response('mysite.com','/api/v1/messages')
p response.body

Answer 2

require 'net/http'
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!