QSslSocket in non-http protocol

[artwaw]

Good morning,
I am trying - for the fun of it - connect and parse a page using the Gemini protocol. And I ran into an issue I can't solve, I keep running in circles. I blame my poor knowledge of socket programming.

The problem:
I can connect to the host and get the content but only when using domain global address, i.e. somepage.org
Whenever I try to get particular document (think: webpage, just extension is .gmi instead of .html) I get an error from the server.

The specification of a request is simple:

request = absolute-URI CRLF

My code:

oid GeminiProtocol::fetchPage(const QString &uri) {
    if (uri.isEmpty()) { qDebug() << "uri empty"; return; }
    QString query = uri;
    QString _uri = uri;
    QStringList parts = query.remove("gemini://").split('/',Qt::SkipEmptyParts);
    if (socket.state()==QSslSocket::ConnectedState||socket.state()==QSslSocket::ConnectingState) {
        socket.close();
    }
    _uri.append(QChar::CarriageReturn).append(QChar::LineFeed);
    socket.connectToHostEncrypted(parts.at(0),_port);
    socket.write(QByteArray(_uri.toUtf8()));
}

The question:
is this boilerplate code above more or less ok (I have slots connected to signals in case of an error etc) or have I missed something?

[Axel Spoerl]

@artwaw said in QSslSocket in non-http protocol:

I get an error from the server.

Which error do you get?
Do you get it only with gemini, or also with a normal http request?

[artwaw]

51 which usually means 404 in http. I could understand that on one resource, but I get it constantly when asking for any.

I shall post http test result as soon as I rewrite part of it to work with http...

[Axel Spoerl]

In that case, you may want to debug all the credentials used to connect (_uri, parts, _port). Maybe something goes wrong building those. That would explain the 51 coming up all the time.

[artwaw]

@Axel-Spoerl I did that and found nothing out of order. So I posted here, in hope there is something obvious about sockets that I missed - I don't use them very often and never for http related stuff (qnam is good enough).

I shall also download some other gemini client and verify the existence of resources I am trying to reach, it dawned on me that some of links might be out of date. I shall post my findings here and close the thread in due time.

Many thanks for the advice!

[Axel Spoerl]

I can feel the pain. Trying the same requests with another toolset is always a good idea!
Getting curious about what caused the issue.

[artwaw]

@Axel-Spoerl small updates:

1. I tried different Gemini browser, namely Sputnik (written in Swift) - works barely better than my prototype but it does work and I could verify the links - they do work, so the problem is within my code somewhere.
2. there is a Qt5 multi browser named Kristall, written with Qt5 and long not updated at all. Porting it to Qt6 should not be much of a problem (some outdated classes, like QRegExp but not much of it), porting it to macOS is a bit more complex so I'll not attempt unless bored. BUT. They also use QSslSocket so now I'll have a read through their code and see where did I go wrong.

More updates once I do the read.