Re: [cpp-netlib-devel] HTTP Synchronous server reply methods?

[Nelson, E. - 2 <eri...@ba...>]

> Dean Michael Berris wrote on Saturday, January 29, 2011 8:33 AM
> On Sat, Jan 29, 2011 at 7:08 AM, David Hite <dav...@gm...> wrote:
>> However, now I have the problem that response.content is a string.
>> How do I
>> send binary data, such as an image file?
>>
> 
> The way I would do it is to somehow mmap the file, get the mmap'ed
> pointer, and copy the data into response.content directly. Binary data
> is held fine by std::string instances, you just have to reserve the
> appropriate amount of memory when you're doing that.
> 

This question will continue to come up.  It's true that std::string *can* hold binary data.  It's just not *natural*.  The std::string interface is strongly influenced by null-terminated strings.  Things that the interface implies (like string.c_str() or string(char*) constructor actually do what you'd think) are broken if you use std::string with binary data.

The more natural interface (used by asio as well) is a buffer object which is just a tuple of the form {void*, size_t}, which is easily constructed from a string, vector<char>, array, or just about any container that the user has for the data.  The user should *not* be forced to make a copy of their data in a std::string just to satisfy the network library.

Erik

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