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pythonhttp-headerscgi
Alec Fenichel
Alec Fenichel

Reputation: 1317

How to read all HTTP headers in Python CGI script?

I have a python CGI script that receives a POST request containing a specific HTTP header. How do you read and parse the headers received? I am not using BaseHTTPRequestHandler or HTTPServer. I receive the body of the post with sys.stdin.read(). Thanks.

Upvotes: 6

Views: 6367

Answers (2)

André Fernandes
André Fernandes

Reputation: 2585

It is possible to get a custom request header's value in an apache CGI script with python. The solution is similar to this.

Apache's mod_cgi will set environment variables for each HTTP request header received, the variables set in this manner will all have an HTTP_ prefix, so for example x-client-version: 1.2.3 will be available as variable HTTP_X_CLIENT_VERSION.

So, to read the above custom header just call os.environ["HTTP_X_CLIENT_VERSION"].

The below script will print all HTTP_* headers and values:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import os

print "Content-Type: text/html"
print "Cache-Control: no-cache"
print

print "<html><body>"
for headername, headervalue in os.environ.iteritems():
    if headername.startswith("HTTP_"):
        print "<p>{0} = {1}</p>".format(headername, headervalue)


print "</html></body>"

Upvotes: 5

Noctis Skytower
Noctis Skytower

Reputation: 22041

You might want to look at the cgi module included with Python's standard library. It appears to have a cgi.parse_header(string) function that you might find to be helpful in trying to get the headers.

Upvotes: 0

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