Re^3: Decode perl cgi response in C

in reply to Re^2: Decode perl cgi response in C
in thread Decode perl cgi response in C

I get the feeling that you want help on the HTTP protocol. If you don't have (or can't use) any libraries to help, a minimal method would be to open a TCP connection and send a request message, which consists of the following:

A request line, for example GET /images/logo.png HTTP/1.1, which requests a resource called /images/logo.png from the server.
Request Headers, such as Accept-Language: en
An empty line.
An optional message body.

The request line and headers must all end with <CR><LF> (that is, a carriage return character followed by a line feed character). The empty line must consist of only <CR><LF> and no other whitespace. In the HTTP/1.1 protocol, all headers except Host are optional (but in practice, it's also optional if there's only one name associated with the IP address). A request line containing only the path name is accepted by servers to maintain compatibility with HTTP clients before the HTTP/1.0 specification.

You will then be able to read the response message, which consists of the following:

A Status-Line (for example HTTP/1.1 200 OK, which indicates that the client's request succeeded)
Zero of more Response Headers, such as Content-Type
An empty line
An optional message body

The Status-Line and headers must all end with <CR><LF> (a carriage return followed by a line feed). The empty line must consist of only <CR><LF> and no other whitespace.

On my computer, entering the command "telnet www.perlmonks.org 80" returns the message "Connecting To www.perlmonks.org...". If I then enter the command "GET / HTTP/1.1" and hit the <Enter> key twice, I get the following:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Via: 1.1 ETC-USRPXY-02
Connection: Keep-Alive
Proxy-Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Length: 47589
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2013 14:08:33 GMT
Age: 74
Content-Type: text/html
ETag: "b9e5-4e24268fd6b00"
Server: Apache/2.2.24
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Last-Modified: Wed, 24 Jul 2013 14:06:04 GMT

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">
<head>
[download]

... followed by roughly 47 KB of other data. You can experiment by using telnet to connect to your server and see what you get back.

Comment on Re^3: Decode perl cgi response in C Download Code

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom