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If there's no Boost library, I'd welcome suggestions for other cross-platform ways to achieve this.

Most Un*x systems have libcurl, which will do this. I don't know about Windows, but this looks promising http://sourceforge.net/projects/curl/

See http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/ Lots of *nix flavors and Windows are supported. There is also a pointer to curlpp, which provides OO C++ bindings: rrette.com/textpattern/index.php?s=cURLpp Chad Walters