C++ with internet input/output

[BradElliott23]

I'm trying to write a program that will read text from a server page*, then use some of the terms from that text as search terms on a different webpage. I'll then copy the results of each search. Is this something that is possible to do in C++?

I've only ever programmed on Windows before, but I'm using a Linux machine for this task. Are there any major differences I should be aware of?

Using C++ isn't entirely necessary (I'm allowed to use whichever language I want), but I'm only familiar with C++, so using it is preferrable to learning a new one.

Also, in my research into this, I heard a lot of references to "sockets," but I wasn't able to determine how that might apply to this specific situation.

*my knowledge of how the Internet works is woefully limited, but I'm fairly sure that the page that I need to read from is not on the Internet but rather on a server connected to this computer. There is no "WWW" in the URL if that matters.

[Cubbi]

You could use tcp streams from boost.asio, as in this web scraping example: http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Web_scraping#C.2B.2B , but boost is too low-level for convenient work with web pages from C++ (and sockets are even more low-level!). I would take a look at the poco library: http://pocoproject.org/ or some other web libraries. Or consider a language that has these features built-in.

[strongdrink]

libcurl, anyone? http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/

[Galik]

I sometimes use cURL:
http://cplusplus.com/forum/unices/45878/#msg249287

Alternatively, if I want to minimise external dependencies:
http://cplusplus.com/forum/general/58677/#msg316810