httprequest - How do you make a HTTP request with C++?

Question

Is there any way to easily make a HTTP request with C++? Specifically, I want to download the contents of a page (an API) and check the contents to see if it contains a 1 or a 0. Is it also possible to download the contents into a string?

Answer 1

I had the same problem. libcurl is really complete. There is a C++ wrapper curlpp that might interest you as you ask for a C++ library. neon is another interesting C library that also support WebDAV.

curlpp seems natural if you use C++. There are many examples provided in the source distribution. To get the content of an URL you do something like that (extracted from examples) :

// Edit : rewritten for cURLpp 0.7.3
// Note : namespace changed, was cURLpp in 0.7.2 ...

#include <curlpp/cURLpp.hpp>
#include <curlpp/Options.hpp>

// RAII cleanup

curlpp::Cleanup myCleanup;

// Send request and get a result.
// Here I use a shortcut to get it in a string stream ...

std::ostringstream os;
os << curlpp::options::Url(std::string("http://example.com"));

string asAskedInQuestion = os.str();

See the examples directory in curlpp source distribution, there is a lot of more complex cases, as well as a simple complete minimal one using curlpp.

my 2 cents ...