there is a Network.HTTP module, but it is not easy to use what you want is the equivalent of perl's LWP::Simple, which provides get() and head() functions i have heard that this is being worked on, in the meantime i personally use this wrapper: http://www.b7j0c.org/content/haskell-http.html that i wrote myself to provide simple get and head functionality with some trivial redirect support i use this module routinely so it should work, although i have only tested it on freebsd and linux no one else has ever looked at this so feel free to send critiques, it is mostly a hack of the get() example script distributed with the Network.HTTP module