Writing String to File in C - html

Question

I am in the process of writing an HTTP client that basically goes to a webpage and downloads the content to a separate file, which the user defines. I am having trouble not with the act of writing to a file itself, but I'm getting a strange problem. I'll show a couple of the code snippets below, but basically when there is a
fprintf(stdout, "%s", htmlcontent);
where htmlcontent is defined as
char *htmlcontent;
it prints out the entire HTML page information to the standard output. I can also redirect this output to a file in the command line by saying >myfile.txt (Yes, I want to compare the text files instead of html files).
But when I do something like this:
fprintf(savedfile, "%s", htmlcontent);
where savedfile is defined as
FILE *savedfile;
and it is opened like this:
savedfile = fopen(filename, "w");
where filename is defined as
char *filename;
and is set equal to the command line argument that corresponds to it. When I do the second type of fprintf to print it out to my file instead of the standard output, I do not get the same thing and i can't figure out why. Can anybody help me understand why there would be any difference? If you want me to post the two different programs so you can see them in their entirety just let me know and I'll do that.

Answer 1

You haven't really told us what the difference is between the two output methods but, based on the information given, there should be none.
Functionally, there's no difference between writing to stdout and any other properly opened output stream (there are some behavioural differences like buffering but they shouldn't affect the output).
The following transcript shows this in action:
pax> cat xyzzy.c
#include <stdio.h>
int main (void) {
char *filename = "xyzzy.txt";
char *html = "<tag>some markup</tag>\n";
FILE *xyzzy = fopen (filename, "w"); // should error check
fprintf (stdout, "%s", html);
fprintf (xyzzy, "%s", html);
fclose (xyzzy);
return 0;
}
pax> ./xyzzy
<tag>some markup</tag>
pax> cat xyzzy.txt
<tag>some markup</tag>
As you can see, both the xyzzy.txt file and the standard output of the program contain the same information.