Remove HTTP Header Info

Question

In C is there a way to exclude the HTTP header information that comes with the data when using recv() on a socket? I am trying to read some binary data and all I want is the actual binary information, not the HTTP header information. The current data received looks like this:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Length: 3314
Content-Type: image/jpeg
Last-Modified: Tue, 20 Mar 2012 14:51:34 GMT
Accept-Ranges: bytes
ETag: "45da99f1a86cd1:6b9"
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2012 14:10:08 GMT
Connection: close 

╪ α

I would like only to read the binary portion of the file. (That's obviously not all the binary, only that much was displayed since I printed the output from my recv loop as a string and the first NULL char is after that small binary string).

I just need to get rid of the header portion, is there a simple way to do this?

Answer 1

You would be better of using some HTTP parsing library like curl

If you want to do it yourself:

You can search for '\r\n\r\n' (two \r\n) which separates HTTP headers and contents, and use string/buffer after that.

Also, you need to get Content-Length from header and read that many bytes as http content.

Something like:

/* http_resp has data read from recv */
httpbody = strstr(http_resp, "\r\n\r\n");
if(httpbody) 
    httpbody += 4; /* move ahead 4 chars
/* now httpbody  has just data, stripped down http headers */

Note: make sure strstr does not overrun the memory, may be using strnstr (not sure this exists or not) or similar functions.