HTTP Request Examples

The form above contains four controls:

A text field bearing the name name
A checkbox bearing the name married
Another checkbox bearing the name male
An unnamed Submit button

The precise HTTP request sent out depends on the enctype and method specifications. The data sent out for the four possible combinations are displayed below:

GET /en/html/dummy.php?name=MyName&married=not+single &male=yes HTTP/1.1
Host: www.explainth.at
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows;en-GB; rv:1.8.0.11) Gecko/20070312 Firefox/1.5.0.11
Accept: text/xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-gb,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://www.explainth.at/en/misc/httpreq.shtml

enctype="application/x-www-form-urlencoded" method="GET"

Note how the form data has been appended to the URL.

POST /en/html/dummy.php HTTP/1.1
Host: www.explainth.at
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows;en-GB; rv:1.8.0.11) Gecko/20070312 Firefox/1.5.0.11
Accept: text/xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-gb,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://www.explainth.at/en/misc/httpreq.shtml
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Length: 39

name=MyName&married=not+single&male=yes

enctype="application/x-www-form-urlencoded" method="POST"

Points to note

The URL simply indicates the Internet resource to be accessed.
The HTTP header specifies Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
The header also specifies Content-Length: 39
The HTTP header is followed by a blank line - caused by a pair of CR/LF characters.
The compacted, URL encoded, form data string follows. It has a length of 39 bytes.

GET /en/html/dummy.php?name=MyName&married=not+single& male=yes HTTP/1.1
Host: www.explainth.at
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows;en-GB; rv:1.8.0.11) Gecko/20070312 Firefox/1.5.0.11
Accept: text/xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-gb,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://www.explainth.at/en/misc/httpreq.shtml?txt=

enctype="multipart/form-data" method="GET"

Note that the multipart/form-data specification was simply ignored by the browser.

POST /en/html/dummy.php HTTP/1.1
Host: www.explainth.at
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows;en-GB; rv:1.8.0.11) Gecko/20070312 Firefox/1.5.0.11
Accept: text/xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-gb,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://www.explainth.at/en/misc/httpreq.shtml?txt=
Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=---------------------------103832778631715
Content-Length: 355

-----------------------------103832778631715
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="name"

MyName
-----------------------------103832778631715
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="married"

not single
-----------------------------103832778631715
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="male"

yes
-----------------------------103832778631715--

enctype="multipart/form-data" method="POST"

Points to note

The URL simply indicates the Internet resource to be accessed.
The HTTP header specifies Content-Type: multipart/form-data
Also specified is a sequence of bytes which do not occur anywhere in the data to follow. This is the ---------------------------103832778631715
The header also specifies Content-Length: 355
The HTTP header is followed by a blank line - caused by two pairs of CR/LF characters.
Following this we have --boundary and a CR/LF pair.
Next we have the first item of form data - the text field.
The other form fields follow in sequence.
The termination of data is indicated by the sequence --boundary--

These examples were captured using FireFox. Although they differ in detail, both Opera and IE yield similar results. If you plan to use these examples to capture HTTP requests in your own custom server be aware that the order of entries in the request header may be different.

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