A socket connecting to a website, and fetching the data returned

Google wouldn't help me, and I didn't find anything on these boards either, so I'm just gonna go ahead and make a new thread.

I'm not quite that good with C++ yet, but I'm not that much of a beginner anymore either.
Now, what I am especially interested in is working with websites, and I'm that type of person that learns best by looking at the source code. However, when searching I only found complex classes, or something for which I wasn't looking.

I have a plea to you, dear advanced C++ programmers. Could you please write a simple connect to a website, fetching data and saving it in a variable? No big extras, just that. I know I can help myself to understand it, once I have the code.

Thanks!

Hi mate,

You need to look into winsock programming. To do what you want is really quite simple. You just initialise winsock. Create a socket and give it the server information that you wish to connect to (ip, port number etc) and then simply connect to the server. Once connected you send data to it using the http protocol and read the response back and store it in a buffer. Then parse the buffer looking for what you are interested in.

This code below should be roughly what you are looking for

Code:

WSADATA wsaData;  

 WSAStartup(MAKEWORD(1, 1), &wsaData) ;

int sockfd, numbytes;  
	char buf[MAXDATASIZE];

	struct sockaddr_in their_addr;

	sockfd = socket(PF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0) ;
	
	their_addr.sin_family = AF_INET; 
	their_addr.sin_port = htons(PORT_HERE);   
	their_addr.sin_addr = inet_addr("IP_HERE");

	memset(their_addr.sin_zero, '\0', sizeof their_addr.sin_zero);

	connect(sockfd, (struct sockaddr *)&their_addr, sizeof their_addr) ;
	
	send(sockfd, "GET /index.html HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n", 28,0) ; //28 is the string length

	numbytes=recv(sockfd, buf, MAXDATASIZE-1, 0) ; // buf now contains the index.html code

	close(sockfd) ;

Note i didnt compile or test the above code but it should be good enough for you to understand whats going on. Oh and dont forget your error checking

Hope this helps, and merry christmas

why thank you! Merry christmas to you too!

For a nice tutorial, see: http://beej.us/guide/bgnet/

[Next time, consider posting threads like this in the Network Programming Forum.]

Or use a library, so you don't have to talk HTTP directly to the website.
http://curl.haxx.se/

or use the Win32 API, so you dont have to link in a library.

> or use the Win32 API, so you dont have to link in a library.
So that isn't a library then huh?
Of course it is, it isn't magic.

More vendor lock-in.