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

I think you need to extract the value of the Content-Length to know the size of the binary data to be read otherwise it will be impossible to know whether all data has been received. A simple approach to consume, and mostly ignore, the header portion is to read the incoming data byte-by-byte until "\r\n\r\n" is encountered, which indicates the end of the header section and the beginning of the content.