Handling Binary Data in HTTP

The lesson showed examples of sending and receiving JSON data over HTTP. But in many cases we need to work with binary data as well, such as images, audio files, zip archives, etc.

To send binary data in an HTTP request body, we can use the std::vector<uint8_t> type to represent the raw bytes of the data:

1#include <cpr/cpr.h>
2#include <vector>
3
4int main() {
5  std::vector<uint8_t> bytes{0xDE, 0xAD, 0xBE, 0xEF};
6
7  cpr::Url URL{"http://www.example.com/upload"};
8
9  cpr::Header headers{
10    {"Content-Type", "application/octet-stream"}
11  };
12
13  cpr::Body body{std::string(
14    bytes.begin(), bytes.end())};
15
16  cpr::Response r = cpr::Post(URL, headers, body);
17}

Here the raw bytes are placed in a std::vector<uint8_t>. The Content-Type header is set to application/octet-stream to indicate the body contains arbitrary binary data. The cpr::Body constructor accepts begin/end iterators so we can initialize it with the contents of the vector.

To receive binary data, we can access the std::vector<uint8_t> directly from the cpr::Response object:

1cpr::Url URL{"http://www.example.com/image.png"};
2
3cpr::Response r = cpr::Get(URL);
4
5std::vector<uint8_t> imageBytes = r.bytes;

We can then save these bytes to a file, decode them in memory, or process them further as needed based on the type of binary data it is (determined by the Content-Type header).