Dealing with a server that doesn't always respond with an HTTP response header

[Jeremy Mayhew <Ma...@orbital.com>]

Hi,

I am using htmlunit+httpclient to test an embedded web application.
Unfortunately there is a large set of requests for which this embedded
webserver does not respond with an HTTP header, but instead splats the body
without a header.  The httpclient rightly throws a protocol exception out
on the malformed response.  (Firefox and IE will still render the pages
without the HTTP response header, so it "works" for the user case.  I can't
change the embedded web server code.)

I was wondering if there is an easy way to configure httpclient to do best
effort on the response and assume that the response is OK so that the
response body can be processed as a valid HTML page.

Thanks!
Jeremy Mayhew


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Re: Dealing with a server that doesn't always respond with an HTTP response header

[Oleg Kalnichevski <ol...@apache.org>]

On Fri, 2008-04-04 at 14:14 -0400, Jeremy Mayhew wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am using htmlunit+httpclient to test an embedded web application.
> Unfortunately there is a large set of requests for which this embedded
> webserver does not respond with an HTTP header, but instead splats the body
> without a header.  The httpclient rightly throws a protocol exception out
> on the malformed response.  (Firefox and IE will still render the pages
> without the HTTP response header, so it "works" for the user case.  I can't
> change the embedded web server code.)
> 
> I was wondering if there is an easy way to configure httpclient to do best
> effort on the response and assume that the response is OK so that the
> response body can be processed as a valid HTML page.
> 

Not easily. HttpClient assumes at least a certain degree of sanity in
HTTP responses. If your application really needs to handle a complete
garbage, the only way I see is to implement a custom HTTP connection
that can test whether an incoming stream contains a valid HTTP response
or an HTML content, and generate a dummy response in the latter case.
One note though, this is possible with HttpClient 4.0 only. You are out
of luck with HttpClient 3.x 

Hope this helps

Oleg


> Thanks!
> Jeremy Mayhew
> 
> 
> -----------------------------------------
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> the express prior approval of the U.S. Department of State.   If
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> sender by reply e-mail and destroy the e-mail message and any
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