CURL C++ no return

August 13, 2022

I’m using curl in my C++ program, and it is returning the HTML from the webpage. But I need it to only return the status code. I’m pretty sure the function that’s returning the contents is called curl_easy_perform().

Long story short, I just need it to return the status code and not the content.

Here is my code.

CURL *curl = curl_easy_init();
if(curl) {
  CURLcode res;
  curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_URL, "example.com");
  res = curl_easy_perform(curl);
  if(res == CURLE_OK) {
    long response_code;
    curl_easy_getinfo(curl, CURLINFO_RESPONSE_CODE, &response_code);
  }
  curl_easy_cleanup(curl);
}

>Solution :

By default, for an HTTP(S) request, curl_easy_perform() will perform a GET request, which retrieves the requested resource’s headers and content. Since you don’t want the content, you should send a HEAD request instead, which will retrieve only the resource’s headers and not its content.

Use the CURLOPT_NOBODY option for this purpose:

CURLOPT_NOBODY – do the download request without getting the body

A long parameter set to 1 tells libcurl to not include the body-part in the output when doing what would otherwise be a download. For HTTP(S), this makes libcurl do a HEAD request. For most other protocols it means just not asking to transfer the body data.

For example:

CURL *curl = curl_easy_init();
if(curl) {
  CURLcode res;
  curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_URL, "example.com");
  curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_NOBODY, 1); // <-- ADD THIS
  res = curl_easy_perform(curl);
  if(res == CURLE_OK) {
    long response_code;
    curl_easy_getinfo(curl, CURLINFO_RESPONSE_CODE, &response_code);
  }
  curl_easy_cleanup(curl);
}