Simple web page retrieval in C

Completely Clueless · 10-22-2009, 11:38 AM

Hi all,

I am trying to find C source code for a program that accepts a URL as an argument and retrieves the html source it links to. Nothing fancy; no recursion or progress indication required nor a GUI. Something like a 'wget lite' if you will; ie, very simple. Any suggestions would be most welcome!

Thanks,
cc.

ntubski · 10-22-2009, 12:52 PM

If you don't mind a dependency on libcurl, try simple.c. The URL is hard coded, but it's a trivial change to accept a command line argument.

tuxdev · 10-22-2009, 01:08 PM

If you don't want a libcurl dependency, it's pretty simple to code up a HTTP client using TCP sockets. Open socket, push GET request through, pull data, close socket.
http://beej.us/guide/bgnet/

If it can be bash rather than C, there's a nifty three-liner example.
http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/devref1.html

Completely Clueless · 10-23-2009, 08:12 AM

Allow me to augment your rather meagre thanks count, Tuxdev. :-)
Oh bugger. I've just noticed my ratio is even worse than yours!

gnashley · 10-23-2009, 11:57 AM

snarf:
http://www.linux.org/apps/AppId_2052.html
It's alot smaller than wget & Co., though it handle ftp and the old gopher protocol.