Hi,
I'm trying to add HTTP authentication to my app (it's a rss reader). As the app is in written in C and uses Libxml2, I've been searching in Libxml2 doc, but it seems it's not possible. Maybe someone could point me to a link to relevant info about how I could achieve that?
Thanks.

Hi -

This has been unanswered for a few days; perhaps I can help:

1. As you probably know, "HTTP Authentication" is a simple protocol where the server challenges the client for username and password. Here's more info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_a...authentication

2. HTTP authentication is supported automatically by most servers (certainly by Apache and IIS), and most browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari, etc etc). So it's a "given" that most web servers and most web clients will probably be able to negotiate HTTP Authentication.

Sooooooooo .....

3. If your C/libXML2 application runs completely independent of any web server (if it opens its open sockets and listens on its own port), you'll probably have to "roll your own" authentication mechanism. It isn't hard - the Wikipedia link above should get you pointed in the right direction.

4. If (as is more likely) your application is invoked by a standard web server (e.g. it's called from an HTML web page served by an Apache server) - then it's REALLY easy. You just write an .htaccess file for the directory with your HTML.

It's really as simple as that

'Hope that helps .. PSM

In my app, the user enter a RSS feed URL. Then this URL is processed first by libXML2, which is reponsible for downloading and parsing the remote resource. So, the app doesn't deal directly with socket. It only passes the URL to libxml2 then get a downloaded file.

So, if I'm right, it could be enough to just pass a string like, for instance: "http://" ( "user : password" ) base64-encoded @ "rss-news.com/feed1.xml" to libxml2.

Of course, I'm going to try that out. Thanks!

If I may ask another question, I'd like to add proxy server support too. I could find a lot of doc on proxy server itself but not on how applications can implement that.
Thanks again.

Is your application responsible for the entire HTTP transaction, or is it being invoked by a web-server, e.g. as a dedicated virtual host?

(And if not, why not?)

Yes, the user selects a feed URL, then the URL is passed to libxml2 which downloads and parses it. It's a client application. What I wanted to know is how proxy server info (host name and port number) is supposed to be used/sent by the app. I just read about suffix proxy where proxy info is passed in the URL.

From your answers and after more search, everything I need is documented in the HTTP protocol so I'm going to do that with socket programming. Thanks paulsm4 and sundialsvcs.