HTTP Headers

Hi everyone. I'm trying to code a Wikipedia bot using libcurl. After a request, the following is in my 'header' buffer. Now, I want to parse this for errors, which is not easy because I'm trying to use C99 and <string.h>

1. Is it normal to get 3 or more than 1 header in reply?

2. If I do, should I simply strstr the lot of them for all the common MediaWiki API errors? Can I assume that if there's an error, it will be in the last one?

Code:

HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Sun, 06 Mar 2011 07:54:39 GMT
Server: Apache
Cache-Control: private
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Length: 513
Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8
X-Cache: MISS from sq33.wikimedia.org
X-Cache-Lookup: MISS from sq33.wikimedia.org:3128
X-Cache: MISS from sq63.wikimedia.org
X-Cache-Lookup: MISS from sq63.wikimedia.org:80
Connection: close

HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Sun, 06 Mar 2011 07:54:40 GMT
Server: Apache
Cache-Control: public, s-maxage=0, max-age=2678400
Last-Modified: Sun, 06 Mar 2011 07:51:25 GMT
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Length: 386
Content-Type: text/x-wiki; charset=UTF-8
X-Cache: MISS from sq63.wikimedia.org
X-Cache-Lookup: MISS from sq63.wikimedia.org:3128
X-Cache: MISS from sq71.wikimedia.org
X-Cache-Lookup: MISS from sq71.wikimedia.org:80
Connection: close

HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Sun, 06 Mar 2011 07:54:41 GMT
Server: Apache
Cache-Control: private
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Length: 933
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
X-Cache: MISS from sq34.wikimedia.org
X-Cache-Lookup: MISS from sq34.wikimedia.org:3128
X-Cache: MISS from sq65.wikimedia.org
X-Cache-Lookup: MISS from sq65.wikimedia.org:80
Connection: close

It could be anything at all.

The only thing you can rely on for HTTP is getting the double \r\n at the end of the header. That's the only clue you have that you've got the whole header.

Whether you get the whole header in a single recv() call, or one byte at a time is entirely down to the network transport at that moment in time. You need to reassemble the received message into a string you can parse.

Or are you asking why you have 3 headers to begin with?
What sort of request did you send?

Well, libcurl claims that it won't return until the whole message is received. I'm not sure how it tells that the whole message has been received, but it does.

This was the result of an HTTP_POST request.

Richard

Ah - missed that bit - sorry.

Well it seems you've got 3 headers, with 3 different content lengths.

What was the POST request?

Actually, I think this is my mistake. I failed to reset the pointers sent to libcurl, so the headers were written after each other instead of over the top of each other. My bad. I'm a newb.

Richard

Hi Richard... you might find this helpful...

RFC Sourcebook

Look up the HTTP Protocal...