Accessing the web page's HTTP Headers in JavaScript

Question

How do I access a page\'s HTTP response headers via JavaScript?

Related to this question, which was modified to ask about accessing two specific HTTP headers.

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Answer 1

Like many people I've been digging the net with no real answer :(

I've nevertheless find out a bypass that could help others. In my case I fully control my web server. In fact it is part of my application (see end reference). It is easy for me to add a script to my http response. I modified my httpd server to inject a small script within every html pages. I only push a extra 'js script' line right after my header construction, that set an existing variable from my document within my browser [I choose location], but any other option is possible. While my server is written in nodejs, I've no doubt that the same technique can be use from PHP or others.

  case ".html":
    response.setHeader("Content-Type", "text/html");
    response.write ("")
    // process the real contend of my page

Now every html pages loaded from my server, have this script executed by the browser at reception. I can then easily check from JavaScript if the variable exist or not. In my usecase I need to know if I should use JSON or JSON-P profile to avoid CORS issue, but the same technique can be used for other purposes [ie: choose in between development/production server, get from server a REST/API key, etc ....]

On the browser you just need to check variable directly from JavaScript as in my example, where I use it to select my Json/JQuery profile

 // Select direct Ajax/Json profile if using GpsdTracking/HttpAjax server otherwise use JsonP
  var corsbypass = true;  
  if (location['GPSD_HTTP_AJAX']) corsbypass = false;

  if (corsbypass) { // Json & html served from two different web servers
    var gpsdApi = "http://localhost:4080/geojson.rest?jsoncallback=?";
  } else { // Json & html served from same web server [no ?jsoncallback=]
    var gpsdApi = "geojson.rest?";
  }
  var gpsdRqt = 
      {key   :123456789 // user authentication key
      ,cmd   :'list'    // rest command
      ,group :'all'     // group to retreive
      ,round : true     // ask server to round numbers
   };
   $.getJSON(gpsdApi,gpsdRqt, DevListCB);

For who ever would like to check my code: https://www.npmjs.org/package/gpsdtracking