Interacting with webpage from C program

[Look-]

Hello, i recently created a program and i want to add something similar like this to it which happens on program startup:

1. Program executes.
2. Program checks "www.example.com" for a string on the webpage.
   3. if the string is there, continue running the program as normal.
   4. if the string is not there, the program closes.

or

1. Program executes.
2. Program checks "www.example.com/check.php" to see if check.php is there.
   3. if the check.php file is there, continue running the program as normal.
   4. if the check.php file is not there, the program closes.

i've been searching google for a couple of hours and all i get is irrelevant results, first i'd like to know, is this possible with the standard C libraries that come installed with dev-cpp and second i'd like to know, if it is possible with the standard C libraries, which libraries would be used. If not, could someone point me to a library that would make this possible?

thanks in advance.

[zacs7]

Not with the standard libraries. Networking is not a part of standard C.

You have a few choices,
1. Use libcurl
2. Use winsock (comes with dev-cpp) and the HTTP protocol

IMO, I'd go with #2. Simply connect to the server, request the page -- then check the response (200OK or 404, etc).

Good luck!

[Codeplug]

You could also use a 3rd party application to do the HTTP work for you - like GNU wget.

gg

[Look-]

ok, thanks very much for the help guys, i guess i'll have a go at trying it with winsock