Re: urlread

[John W. Eaton]

On  9-Oct-2007, Alexander Barth wrote:

| GAIL wrote:
| > The urlread function doesn't do anything for me; it just returns the empty 
string, as follows:
| > 
| > octave> urlread ("ftp://ftp.octave.org/pub/octave/README";);
| > ans = 
| > 
| > 
| > I use octave-2.9.14. What am I doing wrong?
| > 
| Which
| 
| Do you have curl (library and in development package) installed?
| They are named libcurl3 and libcurl3-dev in Ubuntu/Debian and curl and 
curl-devel in Fedora.
| The configure script should tell you if curl was found.
| 
| (You didn't specify the operating system you are using and from where you got 
octave. I assumed that 
| you compiled from source under Linux).

Perhaps instead of

  #if defined (HAVE_CURL)
    [...]
  #else
    retval(2) = "urlread: not available in this version of Octave";
    retval(1) = 0;
    retval(0) = "";
  #endif

in urlread, we should have

  #if defined (HAVE_CURL)
    [...]
  #else
    error ("urlread: not available in this version of Octave");
  #endif

I think that would be more consistent with what happens for other
functions which are not available due to missing libraries or OS
features.

jwe