Check out your user agent

Normally when sending out requests, you don't get to see the headers that accompany them.

The test platform httpbin.org has got you covered: it has a special address that returns the headers of each request that it reaches. This address is: https://httpbin.org/headers.

If you open this URL in your browser, you get JSON* data in return that tells you the headers of the browser's request. You might see something like Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:80.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/80.0 for User-Agent, based on your current browser and operating system. Give it a try and then return to this exercise!

*JavaScript Object Notation – a popular data exchange format

This exercise is part of the course

Web Scraping in R

View Course

Exercise instructions

Check out the headers that are returned when accessing the above URL in R via the GET() method.

Hands-on interactive exercise

Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.

# Access https://httpbin.org/headers with httr
response <- ___
# Print its content
___(response)

Edit and Run Code