Reading HTTP Header Python

Question

I've written a very basic web server in python that can take in requests and spew data back to the client. But my issue is reading the HTTP request, is there a library in python for easily breaking down the HTTP header? Because I'd rather not use my clunky code just for retrieving the GET data.

Answer 1

You can use Requests module to get all the details from HTTP request, here is a small example below from the documentation

>>> r = requests.get('https://api.github.com/user', auth=('user', 'pass'))
>>> r.status_code
200
>>> r.headers['content-type']
'application/json; charset=utf8'
>>> r.encoding
'utf-8'
>>> r.text
u'{"type":"User"...'
>>> r.json()
{u'private_gists': 419, u'total_private_repos': 77, ...}

Answer 2

Here's how you get just the response headers using the requests library (implementation in Python3):

import requests

url = "https://www.google.com"
response = requests.head(url)
print(response.headers) # prints the entire header as a dictionary
print(response.headers["Content-Length"]) # prints a specific section of the dictionary

It's important to use .head() instead of .get() otherwise you will retrieve the whole file/page.

If you wish to retrieve a URL that requires authentication you can replace the above response with this:

response = requests.head(url, auth=requests.auth.HTTPBasicAuth(username, password))