Using cURL to pull Google Reader starred items – Part 2 UnStaring in Google Reader

In the first part of this tutorial, I pulled a couple of variables from the XML feed of my Google Reader’s “starred items”. Now I wanted to “process” the item and UnStar it. This was not easy for me to put together – it was my first attempt at working with the Google API.

First I needed to get authenticated against Google Services for accessing Google Reader. Here is the shell script to do this:

stty -echo
read -p "Password: " password; echo
stty echo
RESULT=$(curl -s https://www.google.com/accounts/ClientLogin \
--data-urlencode [email protected] --data-urlencode Passwd=$password \
-d accountType=GOOGLE \
-d source=MyAppName \
-d service=reader)

This returned some html that included the AUTH code that I needed to add to the header of each Google Reader Request. I used this AUTH to get a Token (my understanding is that if I wanted to edit an item, I needed the token too). Here are the two pieces of code to parse the AUTH get the Token:

AUTH=$(echo "$RESULT" | grep 'Auth=' | sed  s/Auth=//)
TOKEN=$(curl -s --header "Authorization: GoogleLogin auth=$AUTH" http://www.google.com/reader/api/0/token)

Putting the AUTH together with the Token, and the Source and id from this post, you end up with a cURL command that can mark an item as UnStared:

curl -s http://www.google.com/reader/api/0/edit-tag?client=MyAppName --request POST --header "Authorization: GoogleLogin auth=$AUTH" \
--data-urlencode r=user/-/state/com.google/starred  \
--data-urlencode async=true \
--data-urlencode s=$SOURCE \
--data-urlencode i=$OBJID \
--data-urlencode T=$TOKEN

I was surprised when i got this to work. I am still scared of APIs/REST.