To create a program in C that downloads a PDF file, you’ll need to use some libraries for network communication and possibly for handling PDF files. Here’s a basic outline of how you might approach this:
- Include necessary libraries: You’ll need to include standard libraries for file handling and possibly networking. For networking, you might use sockets or a library like libcurl.
- Set up a connection to the server: If you’re using sockets, you’ll need to establish a connection to the server hosting the PDF file. If you’re using libcurl, you can use its functions to make HTTP requests.
- Send an HTTP request: If you’re using sockets, you’ll need to craft an HTTP request manually. If you’re using libcurl, you can use its functions to send an HTTP GET request.
- Receive the PDF file: Once you’ve sent the request, you’ll receive the PDF file as the response. If you’re using sockets, you’ll need to read the data from the socket and write it to a file. If you’re using libcurl, you can specify a callback function to handle the received data.
- Save the PDF file: Once you’ve received the entire PDF file, you’ll need to save it to disk.
Here’s a very basic example using libcurl:
In this example, we use libcurl to download the PDF file specified by url and save it to a file named “example.pdf”. Make sure you have libcurl installed and linked properly when compiling this code. Additionally, error handling is minimal in this example; in a real application, you’d want to check the return values of libcurl functions for errors and handle them appropriately.