Parse raw HTTP Headers
I have a string of raw HTTP and I would like to represent the fields in an object. Is there any way to parse the individual headers from an HTTP string?
'GET /search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8开发者_运维百科&q=ergterst HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: www.google.com\r\nConnection: keep-alive\r\nAccept: application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5\r\nUser-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_6; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/9.0.597.45 Safari/534.13\r\nAccept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch\r\nAvail-Dictionary: GeNLY2f-\r\nAccept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8\r\n
[...]'
Update: It’s 2019, so I have rewritten this answer for Python 3, following a confused comment from a programmer trying to use the code. The original Python 2 code is now down at the bottom of the answer.
There are excellent tools in the Standard Library both for parsing RFC 821 headers, and also for parsing entire HTTP requests. Here is an example request string (note that Python treats it as one big string, even though we are breaking it across several lines for readability) that we can feed to my examples:
request_text = (
b'GET /who/ken/trust.html HTTP/1.1\r\n'
b'Host: cm.bell-labs.com\r\n'
b'Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3\r\n'
b'Accept: text/html;q=0.9,text/plain\r\n'
b'\r\n'
)
As @TryPyPy points out, you can use Python’s email message library to parse the headers — though we should add that the resulting Message
object acts like a dictionary of headers once you are done creating it:
from email.parser import BytesParser
request_line, headers_alone = request_text.split(b'\r\n', 1)
headers = BytesParser().parsebytes(headers_alone)
print(len(headers)) # -> "3"
print(headers.keys()) # -> ['Host', 'Accept-Charset', 'Accept']
print(headers['Host']) # -> "cm.bell-labs.com"
But this, of course, ignores the request line, or makes you parse it yourself. It turns out that there is a much better solution.
The Standard Library will parse HTTP for you if you use its BaseHTTPRequestHandler
. Though its documentation is a bit obscure — a problem with the whole suite of HTTP and URL tools in the Standard Library — all you have to do to make it parse a string is (a) wrap your string in a BytesIO()
, (b) read the raw_requestline
so that it stands ready to be parsed, and (c) capture any error codes that occur during parsing instead of letting it try to write them back to the client (since we do not have one!).
So here is our specialization of the Standard Library class:
from http.server import BaseHTTPRequestHandler
from io import BytesIO
class HTTPRequest(BaseHTTPRequestHandler):
def __init__(self, request_text):
self.rfile = BytesIO(request_text)
self.raw_requestline = self.rfile.readline()
self.error_code = self.error_message = None
self.parse_request()
def send_error(self, code, message):
self.error_code = code
self.error_message = message
Again, I wish the Standard Library folks had realized that HTTP parsing should be broken out in a way that did not require us to write nine lines of code to properly call it, but what can you do? Here is how you would use this simple class:
# Using this new class is really easy!
request = HTTPRequest(request_text)
print(request.error_code) # None (check this first)
print(request.command) # "GET"
print(request.path) # "/who/ken/trust.html"
print(request.request_version) # "HTTP/1.1"
print(len(request.headers)) # 3
print(request.headers.keys()) # ['Host', 'Accept-Charset', 'Accept']
print(request.headers['host']) # "cm.bell-labs.com"
If there is an error during parsing, the error_code
will not be None
:
# Parsing can result in an error code and message
request = HTTPRequest(b'GET\r\nHeader: Value\r\n\r\n')
print(request.error_code) # 400
print(request.error_message) # "Bad request syntax ('GET')"
I prefer using the Standard Library like this because I suspect that they have already encountered and resolved any edge cases that might bite me if I try re-implementing an Internet specification myself with regular expressions.
Old Python 2 code
Here’s the original code for this answer, back when I first wrote it:
request_text = (
'GET /who/ken/trust.html HTTP/1.1\r\n'
'Host: cm.bell-labs.com\r\n'
'Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3\r\n'
'Accept: text/html;q=0.9,text/plain\r\n'
'\r\n'
)
And:
# Ignore the request line and parse only the headers
from mimetools import Message
from StringIO import StringIO
request_line, headers_alone = request_text.split('\r\n', 1)
headers = Message(StringIO(headers_alone))
print len(headers) # -> "3"
print headers.keys() # -> ['accept-charset', 'host', 'accept']
print headers['Host'] # -> "cm.bell-labs.com"
And:
from BaseHTTPServer import BaseHTTPRequestHandler
from StringIO import StringIO
class HTTPRequest(BaseHTTPRequestHandler):
def __init__(self, request_text):
self.rfile = StringIO(request_text)
self.raw_requestline = self.rfile.readline()
self.error_code = self.error_message = None
self.parse_request()
def send_error(self, code, message):
self.error_code = code
self.error_message = message
And:
# Using this new class is really easy!
request = HTTPRequest(request_text)
print request.error_code # None (check this first)
print request.command # "GET"
print request.path # "/who/ken/trust.html"
print request.request_version # "HTTP/1.1"
print len(request.headers) # 3
print request.headers.keys() # ['accept-charset', 'host', 'accept']
print request.headers['host'] # "cm.bell-labs.com"
And:
# Parsing can result in an error code and message
request = HTTPRequest('GET\r\nHeader: Value\r\n\r\n')
print request.error_code # 400
print request.error_message # "Bad request syntax ('GET')"
mimetools
has been deprecated since Python 2.3 and totally removed from Python 3 (link).
Here is how you should do in Python 3:
import email
import io
import pprint
# […]
request_line, headers_alone = request_text.split('\r\n', 1)
message = email.message_from_file(io.StringIO(headers_alone))
headers = dict(message.items())
pprint.pprint(headers, width=160)
This seems to work fine if you strip the GET
line:
import mimetools
from StringIO import StringIO
he = "Host: www.google.com\r\nConnection: keep-alive\r\nAccept: application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5\r\nUser-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_6; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/9.0.597.45 Safari/534.13\r\nAccept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch\r\nAvail-Dictionary: GeNLY2f-\r\nAccept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8\r\n"
m = mimetools.Message(StringIO(he))
print m.headers
A way to parse your example and add information from the first line to the object would be:
import mimetools
from StringIO import StringIO
he = 'GET /search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=ergterst HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: www.google.com\r\nConnection: keep-alive\r\n'
# Pop the first line for further processing
request, he = he.split('\r\n', 1)
# Get the headers
m = mimetools.Message(StringIO(he))
# Add request information
m.dict['method'], m.dict['path'], m.dict['http-version'] = request.split()
print m['method'], m['path'], m['http-version']
print m['Connection']
print m.headers
print m.dict
Using python3.7, urllib3.HTTPResponse
, http.client.parse_headers
, and with curl flag explanation here:
curl -i -L -X GET "http://httpbin.org/relative-redirect/3" | python -c '
import sys
from io import BytesIO
from urllib3 import HTTPResponse
from http.client import parse_headers
rawresponse = sys.stdin.read().encode("utf8")
redirects = []
while True:
header, body = rawresponse.split(b"\r\n\r\n", 1)
if body[:4] == b"HTTP":
redirects.append(header)
rawresponse = body
else:
break
f = BytesIO(header)
# read one line for HTTP/2 STATUSCODE MESSAGE
requestline = f.readline().split(b" ")
protocol, status = requestline[:2]
headers = parse_headers(f)
resp = HTTPResponse(body, headers=headers)
resp.status = int(status)
print("headers")
print(resp.headers)
print("redirects")
print(redirects)
'
Output:
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 0
100 215 100 215 0 0 435 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 435
headers
HTTPHeaderDict({'Connection': 'keep-alive', 'Server': 'gunicorn/19.9.0', 'Date': 'Thu, 20 Sep 2018 05:39:25 GMT', 'Content-Type': 'application/json', 'Content-Length': '215', 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin': '*', 'Access-Control-Allow-Credentials': 'true', 'Via': '1.1 vegur'})
redirects
[b'HTTP/1.1 302 FOUND\r\nConnection: keep-alive\r\nServer: gunicorn/19.9.0\r\nDate: Thu, 20 Sep 2018 05:39:24 GMT\r\nContent-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8\r\nContent-Length: 0\r\nLocation: /relative-redirect/2\r\nAccess-Control-Allow-Origin: *\r\nAccess-Control-Allow-Credentials: true\r\nVia: 1.1 vegur',
b'HTTP/1.1 302 FOUND\r\nConnection: keep-alive\r\nServer: gunicorn/19.9.0\r\nDate: Thu, 20 Sep 2018 05:39:24 GMT\r\nContent-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8\r\nContent-Length: 0\r\nLocation: /relative-redirect/1\r\nAccess-Control-Allow-Origin: *\r\nAccess-Control-Allow-Credentials: true\r\nVia: 1.1 vegur',
b'HTTP/1.1 302 FOUND\r\nConnection: keep-alive\r\nServer: gunicorn/19.9.0\r\nDate: Thu, 20 Sep 2018 05:39:24 GMT\r\nContent-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8\r\nContent-Length: 0\r\nLocation: /get\r\nAccess-Control-Allow-Origin: *\r\nAccess-Control-Allow-Credentials: true\r\nVia: 1.1 vegur']
notes:
- https://urllib3.readthedocs.io/en/latest/reference/#urllib3.response.HTTPResponse
- parse_headers()
In a pythonic way
request_text = (
b'GET /who/ken/trust.html HTTP/1.1\r\n'
b'Host: cm.bell-labs.com\r\n'
b'Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3\r\n'
b'Accept: text/html;q=0.9,text/plain\r\n'
b'\r\n'
)
print({ k:v.strip() for k,v in [line.split(":",1)
for line in request_text.decode().splitlines() if ":" in line]})
They is another way, simpler and safer way to handle headers. More object oriented. With no need for manual parsing.
Short demo.
1. Parse them
From str
, bytes
, fp
, dict
, requests.Response
, email.Message
, httpx.Response
, urllib3.HTTPResponse
.
from requests import get
from kiss_headers import parse_it
response = get('https://www.google.fr')
headers = parse_it(response)
headers.content_type.charset # output: ISO-8859-1
# Its the same as
headers["content-type"]["charset"] # output: ISO-8859-1
2. Build them
This
from kiss_headers import *
headers = (
Host("developer.mozilla.org")
+ UserAgent(
"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.9; rv:50.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/50.0"
)
+ Accept("text/html")
+ Accept("application/xhtml+xml")
+ Accept("application/xml", qualifier=0.9)
+ Accept(qualifier=0.8)
+ AcceptLanguage("en-US")
+ AcceptLanguage("en", qualifier=0.5)
+ AcceptEncoding("gzip")
+ AcceptEncoding("deflate")
+ AcceptEncoding("br")
+ Referer("https://developer.mozilla.org/testpage.html")
+ Connection(should_keep_alive=True)
+ UpgradeInsecureRequests()
+ IfModifiedSince("Mon, 18 Jul 2016 02:36:04 GMT")
+ IfNoneMatch("c561c68d0ba92bbeb8b0fff2a9199f722e3a621a")
+ CacheControl(max_age=0)
)
raw_headers = str(headers)
Will become
Host: developer.mozilla.org
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.9; rv:50.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/50.0
Accept: text/html, application/xhtml+xml, application/xml; q="0.9", */*; q="0.8"
Accept-Language: en-US, en; q="0.5"
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br
Referer: https://developer.mozilla.org/testpage.html
Connection: keep-alive
Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1
If-Modified-Since: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 02:36:04 GMT
If-None-Match: "c561c68d0ba92bbeb8b0fff2a9199f722e3a621a"
Cache-Control: max-age="0"
Documentation for the kiss-headers library.
Is there any way to parse the individual headers from an HTTP string?
I wrote a simple function that can return a dictionary object, hope it can help you. ^_^
Python 3
def parse_request(request):
raw_list = request.split("\r\n")
request = {}
for index in range(1, len(raw_list)):
item = raw_list[index].split(":")
if len(item) == 2:
request.update({item[0].lstrip(' '): item[1].lstrip(' ')})
return request
raw_request = 'GET /search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=ergterst HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: www.google.com\r\nConnection: keep-alive\r\nAccept: application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5\r\nUser-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_6; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/9.0.597.45 Safari/534.13\r\nAccept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch\r\nAvail-Dictionary: GeNLY2f-\r\nAccept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8\r\n'
request = parse_request(raw_request)
print(request)
print('\n')
print(request.keys())
Output:
{'Host': 'www.google.com', 'Connection': 'keep-alive', 'Accept': 'application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5',
'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_6; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/9.0.597.45 Safari/534.13', 'Accept-Encoding': 'gzip,deflate,sdch', 'Avail-Dictionary': 'GeNLY2f-', 'Accept-Language': 'en-US,en;q=0.8'}
dict_keys(['Host', 'Connection', 'Accept', 'User-Agent', 'Accept-Encoding', 'Avail-Dictionary', 'Accept-Language'])
in python3
from email import message_from_string
data = socket.recv(4096)
headers = message_from_string(str(data, 'ASCII').split('\r\n', 1)[1])
print(headers['Host'])
From this question: How to parse raw HTTP request in Python 3?
Here are some Python packages aimed at proper HTTP protocol parsing:
- https://dpkt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/api/api_auto.html#module-dpkt.http
- https://h11.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
- https://github.com/benoitc/http-parser/ (C backend)
- https://github.com/MagicStack/httptools (based on NodeJS's C backend)
- https://github.com/silentsignal/netlib-offline (shameless plug)
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