how to parse http request in c++

Question

I'm trying to write a small c++ webserver which handles GET, POST, HEAD requests. My problem is I don't know how to parse the headers, message body, etc. It's listening on the socket, I can even write stuff out to the browser just fine, but I'm curious how should I do this in c++.

Afaik a standard GET/POST request should look something like this:

GET /index HTTP/1.1
Host: 192.168.0.199:80
Connection: keep-alive
Accept: */*
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.22 (KHTML, like Gecko)     Chrome/25.0.1364.97 Safari/537.22
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3

this is the message body

All lines ended with '\r\n'.

Should I just split the request at '\n' and trim them (and if so how)? Also how to handle files in post data?

Main thing I want to achieve is to get a vector containing headers key=>value pairs, a string with request method, the post data (like in PHP, if it's present), and the query string (/index for example) as string or vector splitted by '/'.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Before doing everything yourself, I introduce you Poco:

class MyHTTPRequestHandler : public HTTPRequestHandler
{
public:
    virtual void handleRequest(HTTPServerRequest & request,
                               HTTPServerResponse & response) {
        // Write your HTML response in res object
    }
};

class MyRequestHandlerFactory : public HTTPRequestHandlerFactory
{
    MyHTTPRequestHandler handler;

public:
    MyRequestHandlerFactory(){}
    HTTPRequestHandler* createRequestHandler(const HTTPServerRequest& request)
    {
        const string method = request.getMethod();
        if (method == "get" || method == "post")
            return &handler;
        return 0;
    }
};

int main()
{
    HTTPServerParams params;
    params.setMaxQueued(100);
    params.setMaxThreads(16);
    ServerSocket svs(80);
    MyRequestHandlerFactory factory;
    HTTPServer srv(&factory, svs, &params);
    srv.start();
    while (true)
        Thread::sleep(1000);
}