C++, download file in directory - c++

Question

So I have this simple code to download a file from an url opening the browser
#include <iostream>
#include<Windows.h>
#include<string>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
string dwnld_URL = "http://www.url.com/downloadpage";
ShellExecuteA(NULL, "open", dwnld_URL.c_str(), NULL, NULL, SW_SHOWNORMAL);
return 0;
}
But I want the file to go in the current directory instead of going in the default download folder. Is there any way I can do this?

Answer 1

if you're on windows, you can use
#include <iostream>
#include<Windows.h>
#include<string>
#pragma comment(lib, "urlmon.lib")
using namespace std;
int main()
{
string dwnld_URL = "http://www.url.com/downloadpage/filename.txt";
string savepath = "C:\\tmp\\filename.txt";
URLDownloadToFile(NULL, dwnld_URL.c_str(), savepath.c_str(), 0, NULL);
return 0;
}

Answer 2

Read more about HTTP and URLs first.
You want some HTTP client library; you could consider libcurl, but both Qt and POCO have some functions for HTTP client. And probably Windows might have some specific functions around that.
All three libcurl, Qt, POCO are free software libraries, and can run also on Linux and POSIX systems.
If you need an HTTP server library (which does not seem the case), you could find some also (e.g. Wt, libonion, ...)
Regarding your comment (which should have gone into your question) "but how can I know"?, an intuition could be, for remote data access, to focus on protocols.
Whatever library (or framework) you are using, you'll need to spend many hours or days to study it and read its documentation and tutorials.