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Re: Adding empty HTTP Headers to curl requests?

From: Daniel Stenberg <daniel_at_haxx.se>
Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2006 12:32:26 +0100 (CET)

On Thu, 26 Jan 2006, Cyrill Osterwalder wrote:

> I'm wondering if libcurl supports adding empty HTTP headers to requests? An
> empty HTTP header means a header that does not have a value after the colon,
> e.g. ("EmptyHeader:").

No it doesn't! ;-(

> Empty HTTP headers are imho legal according to RFC. They are used in certain
> environments to indicate special things to back-end services.

Yes, I agree that it was a bad choice back then to prevent blank headers...
but hey, what's done is done!

> Any suggestions how empty HTTP headers could/should be supported by libcurl?

Not really, but I'm thinking we could for example exploit the fact that
headers aren't allowed to contain ascii 1 - 31, not in the name nor in the
"field-body" part. Thus we could easily for example let "header:\x01" mean
"add this header with a blank data". We could even hide the kludgy feeling by
using a define instead of \x01, like: "header:" NO_FIELD_BODY or similar.

Opinions? Other ideas?

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Received on 2006-01-26