Question

I need to sent a HTTP GET Request to my site and then get the contents of the page and parse it. I’de prefer to not use libraries like libCURL because I want the end application to be fully independent (This is quoting from personal experience, I may be wrong but if I recall the client has to have certain Dynamic Link Libraries to run applications with libCURL libraries.), I’m using C++ in Visual Studio 2012.

Code examples would also be good.

Answer 1

When you don’t want to use an external library, you will have to implement HTTP yourself. When you only need the basic functionality (direct download of a file, no redirects, no proxies, no cookies, no authentication, no encryption, no compression, no other shenanigans), this isn’t even that hard.

Create a socket, connect it to port 80 of your webserver, and send the following strings to the server:

"GET /example.html HTTP/1.1\r\n"
"Host: www.example.com\r\n"
"\r\n"

This requests the file http://www.example.com/example.html from the server you connected to.

The server will respond with an own HTTP response header followed by the data (or an error description).