What are the main features of Reqwest?

Reqwest is a popular HTTP client library in Rust for making web requests. It provides a convenient, higher-level API for sending HTTP requests and receiving responses. Below are some of the main features of Reqwest:

1. Easy to Use: Reqwest offers a fluent and ergonomic interface for building and sending requests.

2. Asynchronous/Synchronous: It supports both asynchronous (async/await) and blocking (synchronous) requests, allowing you to choose the model that fits your application's needs.

3. TLS Support: Reqwest comes with built-in support for HTTPS, utilizing rustls or the native system library (depending on the feature flags used).

4. JSON Support: With Reqwest, you can easily send and receive JSON payloads by leveraging its integration with serde, Rust's serialization/deserialization framework.

5. Customizable: It allows for extensive customization of requests, including setting headers, query parameters, request bodies, timeouts, and more.

6. Streaming: Reqwest supports streaming uploads and downloads, which is useful for handling large files or data streams without consuming large amounts of memory.

7. Cookies: The library can handle HTTP cookies automatically and allows for custom cookie store implementations.

8. Proxies: Reqwest supports HTTP/HTTPS proxies and provides easy configuration options.

9. Redirect Policies: You can configure custom policies to handle HTTP redirects as per your requirements.

10. Multiparts Requests: It supports multiparts/form-data requests, which are often used for uploading files.

11. Standards Compliance: Reqwest aims to be HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 compliant.

12. Error Handling: The library provides detailed error information, making it easier to debug issues with HTTP requests.

13. Platform Independence: Reqwest works across a variety of platforms, including Linux, macOS, and Windows.

14. International Domains: Supports international domain names (IDNA).

Here is a simple example of how to use Reqwest to make a GET request:

// async example
use reqwest;
use std::error::Error;

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn Error>> {
    let response = reqwest::get("https://httpbin.org/ip").await?;
    let body = response.text().await?;

    println!("body = {:?}", body);
    Ok(())
}

For a synchronous/blocking request, you would use the reqwest::blocking module:

// blocking example
use reqwest;
use std::error::Error;

fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn Error>> {
    let response = reqwest::blocking::get("https://httpbin.org/ip")?;
    let body = response.text()?;

    println!("body = {:?}", body);
    Ok(())
}

Remember to include reqwest in your Cargo.toml dependencies to use it in your project:

[dependencies]
reqwest = "0.11" # Check for the latest version on crates.io
tokio = { version = "1", features = ["full"] } # If using async

These features make Reqwest a versatile and powerful tool for HTTP networking in Rust applications.