I read a few articles on c++ / curl here on stackoverflow and assembled the following. The main goal is to handle the whole request in an instance of a class -- and maybe later in a secondary thread.

My problem is: "content_" seems to stay empty though its the same addr and

HttpFetch.h:

class HttpFetch
{
private:
    CURL *curl;
    static size_t handle(char * data, size_t size, size_t nmemb, void * p);
    size_t handle_impl(char * data, size_t size, size_t nmemb);
public:
    std::string content_;
    static std::string url_;
    HttpFetch(std::string url);
    void start();
    std::string data();
};

HttpFetch.cpp:

HttpFetch::HttpFetch(std::string url) {

    curl_global_init(CURL_GLOBAL_ALL); //pretty obvious
    curl = curl_easy_init();

    content_.append("Test");
    std::cout << &content_ << "\n";

    curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_URL, &url);
    curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_WRITEDATA, &content_);
    curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_WRITEFUNCTION, &HttpFetch::handle);
    //curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1L); //tell curl to output its progress
    curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1L);

    //std::cout << &content_ << "\n";
}

void HttpFetch::start() {

    curl_easy_perform(curl);
    curl_easy_cleanup(curl);
}

size_t HttpFetch::handle(char * data, size_t size, size_t nmemb, void * p)
{
    std::string *stuff = reinterpret_cast<std::string*>(p);

    stuff->append(data, size * nmemb);

    std::cout << stuff << "\n"; // has content from data in it!

    return size * nmemb; 
}

main.cpp:

#include "HttpFetch.h"
int main(int argc, const char * argv[])
{

    HttpFetch call = *new HttpFetch("http://www.example.com");
    call.start();

    ::std::cout << call.content_ << "\n"
}

Thanks in advance