How do you make a HTTP request with C++?

Question

Is there any way to easily make a HTTP request with C++? Specifically, I want to download the contents of a page (an API) and check the contents to see if it contains a 1 o

Answer 1

Here is some (relatively) simple C++11 code that uses libCURL to download a URL's content into a std::vector:

http_download.hh

# pragma once

#include 
#include 

std::vector download(std::string url, long* responseCode = nullptr);

http_download.cc

#include "http_download.hh"

#include 
#include 
#include 

using namespace std;

size_t callback(void* contents, size_t size, size_t nmemb, void* user)
{
  auto chunk = reinterpret_cast(contents);
  auto buffer = reinterpret_cast*>(user);

  size_t priorSize = buffer->size();
  size_t sizeIncrease = size * nmemb;

  buffer->resize(priorSize + sizeIncrease);
  std::copy(chunk, chunk + sizeIncrease, buffer->data() + priorSize);

  return sizeIncrease;
}

vector download(string url, long* responseCode)
{
  vector data;

  curl_global_init(CURL_GLOBAL_ALL);
  CURL* handle = curl_easy_init();
  curl_easy_setopt(handle, CURLOPT_URL, url.c_str());
  curl_easy_setopt(handle, CURLOPT_WRITEFUNCTION, callback);
  curl_easy_setopt(handle, CURLOPT_WRITEDATA, &data);
  curl_easy_setopt(handle, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "libcurl-agent/1.0");
  CURLcode result = curl_easy_perform(handle);
  if (responseCode != nullptr)
    curl_easy_getinfo(handle, CURLINFO_RESPONSE_CODE, responseCode);
  curl_easy_cleanup(handle);
  curl_global_cleanup();

  if (result != CURLE_OK)
  {
    stringstream err;
    err << "Error downloading from URL \"" << url << "\": " << curl_easy_strerror(result);
    throw runtime_error(err.str());
  }

  return move(data);
}