Question

How can I download a file using libcurl and rather than save it to disk, just read its file contents? I see that I can use the WRITEFUNCTION to write the file to disk, but I do not see how I can just pull from the server and read without saving to disk first.

Answer 1

You can use WRITEFUNCTION to write anywhere you want, even keeping things in memory only without writing to disk. Look at the example in the libcurl website:

http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/getinmemory.html

The example is C-ish, but you can easily replace the allocations with a vector<byte> or a string