How do I read only x number of bytes of the body using Net::HTTP?

Question

It seems like the methods of Ruby's Net::HTTP are all or nothing when it comes to reading the body of a web page. How can I read, say, the just the first 100 bytes of the body?

I am trying to read from a content server that returns a short error message in the body of the response if the file requested isn't available. I need to read enough of the body to determine whether the file is there. The files are huge, so I don't want to get the whole body just to check if the file is available.

Answer 1

This is an old thread, but the question of how to read only a portion of a file via HTTP in Ruby is still a mostly unanswered one according to my research. Here's a solution I came up with by monkey-patching Net::HTTP a bit:

require 'net/http'

# provide access to the actual socket
class Net::HTTPResponse
  attr_reader :socket
end

uri = URI("http://www.example.com/path/to/file")
begin
  Net::HTTP.start(uri.host, uri.port) do |http|
    request = Net::HTTP::Get.new(uri.request_uri)
    # calling request with a block prevents body from being read
    http.request(request) do |response|
      # do whatever limited reading you want to do with the socket
      x = response.socket.read(100);
      # be sure to call finish before exiting the block
      http.finish
    end
  end
rescue IOError
  # ignore
end

The rescue catches the IOError that's thrown when you call HTTP.finish prematurely.

FYI, the socket within the HTTPResponse object isn't a true IO object (it's an internal class called BufferedIO), but it's pretty easy to monkey-patch that, too, to mimic the IO methods you need. For example, another library I was using (exifr) needed the readchar method, which was easy to add:

class Net::BufferedIO
  def readchar
    read(1)[0].ord
  end
end