Hacktoberfest 2026: the issues maintainers tagged for October, open and beginner-friendly. Browse Hacktoberfest issues

getRequest returns Request_String instead of Request a

Open
#1 0 comments 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
haskell
Domain
networking

Research direction

Start by locating the definitions and uses of getRequest, postRequest, Request, and BufferType, then compare them with defaultGETRequest_ and the request example in the issue. Determine whether the proposed polymorphic signatures fit the existing API and identify the compatibility and test expectations; done means the request helpers support the intended buffer types without breaking current String usage.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

What's the reason for not having getRequest and postRequest return Request a, i.e.:

getRequest :: BufferType a => String -> Request a
postRequest :: BufferType a => String -> Request a

If they were like this, it would be much easier to tell the library to use (Lazy) ByteStrings instead of Strings. The simplest way I could do that with what's in the library at this point is this:

request :: URI -> IO ByteString
request url = simpleHTTP (defaultGETRequest_ url) >>= getResponseBody

While it's not necessarily ugly or bad, I think it would be much nicer to have polymorphic getRequest/postRequest functions.

Dominant language
Haskell
Stars
186
Forks
59
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from haskell/HTTP

All issues in haskell/HTTP

Similar issues

More Haskell issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.