Get content from HTTP request even if there is no contentlength header

Question

Am testing with a client who send me a HTTP request with no content length header but has a content.

How do I extract this content without the help of contentlength head

Answer 1

If this were a response then the message could be terminated by closing the connection. But that's not an option here because the client still needs to read the response.

Apart from Content-Length:, the other methods of determining content length are:

• Transfer-Encoding: chunked
• guesswork

Hopefully it's the former, in which case the request should look something like this:

POST /some/path HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.com
Content-Type: text/plain
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

25
This is the data in the first chunk

1C
and this is the second one

3
con
8
sequence
0

(shamelessly stolen from the Wikipedia article and modified for a request)

• each chunk is of the form: hex-encoded length, CRLF, data, CRLF
• after the final data-carrying chunk comes a zero-length chunk with no data
• after the zero-length chunk comes optional extra HTTP headers
• after the optional HTTP headers comes another CRLF