Simple C++ MIME parser

Question

I want to digest a multipart response in C++ sent back from a PHP script. Anyone know of a very lightweight MIME parser which can do this for me?

Regards

Robert

Answer 1

How about

ScalingWeb's open source parser ?

"very lightweight" combined with MIME is usually a bad combination. MIME is a very complex standard with book-length RFCs behind it. It's like wanting a "lightweight XML parser". That won't happen either.

Answer 2

VMime?

Answer 3

I know this may be too little, too late, but I had a similar need. I wanted a mime parser that just did the encoding and decoding of the MIME. For the sake of completeness and for Google-ability I thought I should put my findings here. Keep in mind that I was not interested in send and receiving mail, just encoding and decode MIME. Here are the libraries I researched for C++ MIME:

http://www.vmime.org/ - Looks like too much. Contains pop, SMTP, tls, IMAP, could remove this. Posix and windows.

http://codesink.org/mimetic_mime_library.html - looks promising. Very nice api for reading in and creating messages. Went with this one. Not too heavy. Had to “fix” 2 things. First for multipart the code was just check for the string “multipart” and did not recognize “multipart/mixed” and did not write out the parts. Secondly, I had to hack the mimeentity write code. It was just writing out the std::deque Field and since these are strings it seem to be doing so alphabetically. This is problem because the MIME-version has to be the first field written out. So I fixed this. I also had to add support for Content-Length.

http://www.mozilla.org/mailnews/arch/libmime-description.html - Hard time finding this. Had to download the whole package. mailnews\mime\src

http://www.example-code.com/vcpp/smime.asp - Didn’t consider because it had no source code and was windows specific.

http://www.scalingweb.com/mime_parser.php - Didn’t consider because it depends on other stream library from author.

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_mime.html - Couldn’t find this C implementation.

I chose Mimetic for my needs although I had to add a few things to it. None of the parsers I found handled the optional fields (Content-Length, etc..) very well. I also needed it to support multiple platforms (Windows, Linux, etc..)

Answer 4

bnantz,

it would be great if you could send me your patches so I can include them the next release of mimetic.

Answer 5

Not to toot my own horn here, but GMime is a very complete MIME parser written in C which can handle the Content-Length header. It also handles DOS and UNIX line-endings with ease, handles broken header charset encodings, doesn't require you to read the entire message into RAM, supports PGP/MIME, etc. It also has a very comprehensive set of unit tests that I use to prevent any regressions.

People have been building it on Windows for quite a while now (under cygwin and/or mingw32 afaik), but the past week or so I've been spending time making Windows a first-class priority by setting up Visual C++ Project/Solution files and making sure everything builds.

Figured I'd post even though you've already found a MIME parser just so other people who may have a similar question might see another option if the aforementioned solutions don't suit their needs.

Answer 6

Yeah, I like gmime except for the damn loudness of it's parent dependency glib. I can't for the life of me get glib assertions to shut the fuck up. This made steer away from gmime all together.