Am I parsing this HTTP POST request properly?

Question

Let me start off by saying, I\'m using the twisted.web framework. Twisted.web\'s file uploading didn\'t work like I wanted it to (it only included

Answer 1

You're trying to avoid reading documentation, but I think the best advice is to actually read:

• rfc 2388 Returning Values from Forms: multipart/form-data
• rfc 1867 Form-based File Upload in HTML

to make sure you don't miss any cases. An easier route might be to use the poster library.

Answer 2

My solution to this Problem was parsing the content with cgi.FieldStorage like:

class Root(Resource):

def render_POST(self, request):

    self.headers = request.getAllHeaders()
    # For the parsing part look at [PyMOTW by Doug Hellmann][1]
    img = cgi.FieldStorage(
        fp = request.content,
        headers = self.headers,
        environ = {'REQUEST_METHOD':'POST',
                 'CONTENT_TYPE': self.headers['content-type'],
                 }
    )

    print img["upl_file"].name, img["upl_file"].filename,
    print img["upl_file"].type, img["upl_file"].type
    out = open(img["upl_file"].filename, 'wb')
    out.write(img["upl_file"].value)
    out.close()
    request.redirect('/tests')
    return ''

Answer 3

The content-disposition header has no defined order for fields, plus it may contain more fields than just the filename. So your match for filename may fail - there may not even be a filename!

See rfc2183 (edit that's for mail, see rfc1806, rfc2616 and maybe more for http)

Also I would suggest in these kind of regexps to replace every space by \s*, and not to rely on character case.