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 ...