Question

I am making my own simple webserver and I have gotten text files and html files to send perfectly, but when I try to send images, I am having some issues, and I can’t figure it out.

Here is what I have. I know sending one byte at a time is inefficient but it was for testing.

char buffer[1];
send_header(new_fd, get_file_type(file_location));
ifstream file;
file.open(temp.c_str(), ios::out | ios::binary);
while (file.good())
{
    file.read(buffer, sizeof(buffer));
 send(new_fd, buffer, strlen(buffer), 0);
}

Any ideas? Do I need to convert it to network byte order before I send?

Thanks!

Answer 1

strlen(buffer) is going to count up to the first null character ('\0'), which is a very common byte in image data. You need to, instead, figure out how many bytes were actually read (ifstream.read() does not supply this information) and use that in place of your strlen call.

EDIT: You can obtain this with ifstream.gcount() — so just replace your strlen call with file.gcount() and everything should magically work.