Plain

Get data from the web

You can get the weather, look things up and send information to websites, all with the same read step you use for files. Give read a web address that starts with https://, and Plain gets the page for you.

Read a web address

Put the address in double quotes, or keep it under a name, and give it to read. Many websites have addresses made for programs. Instead of a page to look at, they answer with data. This one is from Open-Meteo, a free weather service:

set address to "https://api.open-meteo.com/v1/forecast?latitude=51.51&longitude=-0.13&current=temperature_2m,wind_speed_10m"
read address and call it weather
show weather's current
show "In London it is {weather's current's temperature 2m}°C."
show "The wind is blowing at {weather's current's wind speed 10m} km/h."
Try it

What it shows:

time: 2026-10-23T14:00, interval: 900, temperature_2m: 12.4, wind_speed_10m: 18.7
In London it is 12.4°C.
The wind is blowing at 18.7 km/h.

Press Try it to see the weather in London right now. Your numbers will be different from these.

Reach inside a reply with 's

Use 's to get each piece of a reply. The weather service answers in JSON, a format many websites use. Plain turns a JSON reply into a record, so 's works just as it does on a row of a spreadsheet:

Capitals don't matter, and a space works the same as _, just as with column names. Not sure what a reply holds? Show it, as the first show above does, and you'll see the name of every piece.

Put your own values into an address

Put a name in { } inside the address, the same way you put a value into any text. This example uses JSONPlaceholder, a free practice website full of made-up people:

ask "Which person, from 1 to 10?" and call it number
read "https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/users/{number}" and call it person
show "Person {number} is {person's name} from {person's address's city}."
Try it

What you type:

3

What it shows:

Which person, from 1 to 10? 3
Person 3 is Clementine Bauch from McKenziehaven.

Plain makes each value safe to use in an address, so an answer with spaces, like New York, works too.

Plan for a website that says no

You can plan for a website that's down, slow, or has nothing at the address you asked for. Put the steps that might fail under try. If one of those steps has a problem, Plain skips the rest of them and takes the steps under if that fails instead. There, the problem holds the message Plain would have shown:

ask "Which person, from 1 to 10?" and call it number
try
    read "https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/users/{number}" and call it person
    show "Person {number} is {person's name}."
if that fails
    show "Sorry, Plain couldn't get person {number}."
    show the problem
show "Goodbye!"
Try it

What you type:

99

What it shows:

Which person, from 1 to 10? 99
Sorry, Plain couldn't get person 99.
Check the address. There's nothing at jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/users/99 (code 404). The website answered, but it has no page at that address.
Goodbye!

Without try, the program would stop at that line and show the message. With try, you decide what happens next, and the program goes on.

Send data to a website

send hands a value to a website. A record or a list goes as JSON, and anything else goes as text. The website's reply comes back the same way read gives it. Here, a new record makes an empty record, and set note's title to "Buy milk" puts a value in it under the name title:

set note to a new record
set note's title to "Buy milk"
set note's done to no
send note to "https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts" and call it reply
show "The website saved your note as number {reply's id}."
Try it

What it shows:

The website saved your note as number 101.

JSONPlaceholder only pretends to save what you send, so it's a safe place to practice. A real website's own instructions tell you which address to send to, and what to put in the record you send.

Get the words on a web page

the text of gives you just the words of an ordinary web page, without the formatting codes around them:

read "https://example.com" and call it page
show the text of page
Try it

What it shows:

This domain is for use in documentation examples without needing permission. This is not a service; avoid relying on it for testing and monitoring purposes.

Know what the playground can't read

The playground can read most websites, but not all of them. It runs your program inside your web browser, so it follows the browser's rules, and some websites don't let pages in a browser read them. example.com is one of them. If you press Try it on the last example, Plain asks you to check your internet connection, then explains that some websites don't let pages in a browser read them.

That's a rule of the browser, not a mistake in your program. Run the same program on your computer with plain run and it works. See Install Plain to set that up. The weather and JSONPlaceholder examples work in the playground, because those websites allow it.

In the playground, addresses must also start with https://, not http://.

Try it yourself

Press Try it on any example above, then change it: