HTTP URL redirection now works with Stata 13

[Sergiy Radyakin]

Dear Statalisters, all of a sudden I've just stumbled on the URL redirection finally supported in Stata 13.0 (but not in Stata 12). This is something I had requested back in 2008.
Not sure if it has been described in the changes anywhere (couldn't find it being mentioned, or even intentional).

In older versions of Stata you get an error if the server decides to redirect the request:


Now you do get the proper file:


This seems to be a more reasonable behavior.

Thank you, Sergiy Radyakin.

[Richard Williams]

This is good but I wish it went further. A year or so ago Notre Dame decided we would all be much happier if our URLs started with www3 rather than www. That screwed up a lot of my example code and still screws it up, e.g.

. use http://www.nd.edu/~rwilliam/statafiles/reg01.dta, clear
file http://www.nd.edu/~rwilliam/statafiles/reg01.dta not found
server says file permanently redirected to http://www3.nd.edu/~rwilliam/statafiles/reg01.dta
r(601);

. use http://www3.nd.edu/~rwilliam/statafiles/reg01.dta, clear

I suppose there is some great security concern here but it is still mildly annoying.

[Sergiy Radyakin]

Dear Richard,

I think the problem is not really www3 vs www, but the difference in the server response code. In my example above, the response code is 307 (temporary redirect), in your case it is 301 (moved permanently). The difference is that the 307 is only a maintenance code, saying for now the requested resource can be obtained from an alternative location (for whatever reason, for example authorized and non-authorized users get different content, users from different regions get different content, load balancing between the servers, you name it). In your case the resource has moved, permanently, it is no longer available at this url, you should be using the alternative url, which is provided to you by the server. So just update your codes.

Different software decide for themselves how to treat the response codes. This is how e.g. the ever popular Total Commander handles it:

Connect to: (06/24/2014 11:23:20)
hostname=www.nd.edu
www.nd.edu=54.243.157.38
Connect
GET /~rwilliam/statafiles/reg01.dta HTTP/1.0
Host: www.nd.edu
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Totalcmd; XWHATEVEROSX)
Connection: close

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Location: http://www3.nd.edu/~rwilliam/statafiles/reg01.dta
----------
Connect to: (06/24/2014 11:23:20)
hostname=www3.nd.edu
www3.nd.edu=129.74.12.151
Connect
GET /~rwilliam/statafiles/reg01.dta HTTP/1.0
Host: www3.nd.edu
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Totalcmd; XWHATEVEROSX)
Connection: close

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Copied (06/24/2014 11:23:20): http://www3.nd.edu/~rwilliam/statafiles/reg01.dta -> c:\Users\XWHATEVERUSERX\Desktop\reg01.dta 980 bytes

In any case I still wish we could get the http response code programmatically, as well as, perhaps, get a warning on 307 just for logging and protocol purposes.

Best regards, Sergiy Radyakin