Rex Swain's HTTP Viewer

See exactly what an HTTP request returns to your browser

Instructions

Basically, just enter a URL and then click the Submit button. The fine print follows...

URL: Must begin with http:// ; we don't do secure servers. Request Type:

GET, the default, shows both the header and content. HEAD shows only the header -- a good choice if that's all you care about, or if you anticipate a very large amount of content. TRACE is of limited interest -- it just reiterates the request.

Version: The HTTP version may influence the server's response. HTTP/1.1 is the more modern version. Note that when you use HTTP/1.1 the server may respond with "chunked" data (indicated by Transfer-Encoding: chunked in the header) where the complete response is broken up into smaller chunks. Display Format:

Auto-Detect, the default, looks at the Content-Type line in the header and chooses what it thinks is the appropriate display type. Text forces text display, which is suitable for HTML files. Hex forces hexadecimal display, which would be more appropriate for image files.

User-Agent: This is optional. Sometimes a remote server may return a different response depending on the client or browser that initiated the request. If you don't specify a user-agent identification string, we will copy the one that your current browser uses. Referer: New

(Yes, this is misspelled -- it should be "referrer". See origin of the term referer.) Also optional. Tells the server the URL from which the requested URL was obtained. The server may respond differently to a request depending on the referring resource. It also allows a server to generate lists of back-links to resources for interest, logging, optimized caching, etc. It also allows obsolete or mistyped links to be traced for maintenance. The referer field should NOT be sent if the requested URL was obtained from a source that does not have its own URL, such as input from the user keyboard. Accept-Encoding: Also optional. This header is sometimes used to specify that the browser is willing to accept certain formats in the server's response. An example would be compress, gzip . Auto-Follow Location: If the server returns a Location: line in the HTTP header, it instructs your browser to "forward" or "redirect" itself to that new location. If this option is selected, HttpView will automatically continue to query such new locations (up to a maximum of 4 times).

A special "thank you" from Yves Latour, co-founder of the search engine for brochures & catalogs:
Who-sells-it.com
10-Jul-2008

Who-sells-it.com is a search engine for brochures and catalogs. Everyone owning some sort of product catalog using the popular PDF format can have it added for free. There are no catchy terms attached, but the catalog file should be online already and allow an easy spidering and fetching. The robots.txt file is supported.

Sometimes our catalog spider cannot fetch a catalog as supposed or we have a problem with one of our own web documents. Usually, the first move is getting over to Rex Swain's HTTP Viewer, slapping the URL into the input box to check the document header. In most cases this gives us the information we need to know to be able to understand the problem. We appreciate the existence of such free tools. Thank you, Rex, for saving us time!

From Fred Langa's "LangaList" Newsletter

17-Feb-2000

LangaList reader Rex Swain is a consultant and needed a way to see easily what was going on behind the scenes of various web sites when he clicked in. So, he wrote an "HTTP Viewer" that anyone can use (for free!). It intercepts and displays *everything* that transpires between a browser and any given web page, showing you stuff your browser normally hides.

For example, when you connect to Amazon.Com, you'll normally see your browser churn for a few seconds (showing a blank page) and then the Amazon home page comes up. But Rex's tool lets you see that you're actually viewing three pages in rapid succession: An initial page quickly redirects you to a second page that sets a cookie; and then that page dumps you to a third page where another cookie is set. Your browser only shows you the third page, but Rex's spy tool lets you see everything -- and I mean everything -- that's going on, including the cookie contents and the URLs of the hidden pages.

From Netsurfer Digest 7/28/00

Cool Web Analysis Tools for the Rest of Us

What's really going on when you type that URL into your browser? Rex Swain has put together a site that can show you. Who knew, for example, that connecting to Amazon.com actually shoots you through three pages (setting cookies all the way) before you're finally presented with the user interface screen? There's more. You can find out what's being used on the server (Apache 1.3.4, anyone?) of your choice. The site's not bulletproof - it times out after ten seconds, so we had to try some page tests several times before they took and yielded data. One other thing: Rex's probes don't function on secured servers. We can live with that; it's a great tool, and provided free of charge.

What You'll See

The Header section shows stuff that your browser would receive but not display. For example:

Last-Modified: tells when the file was most recently modified Set-Cookie: asks your browser to create a cookie Location: asks your browser to go to another URL

The Content section shows the data that your browser would display for you -- somewhat like using your browser's View Source feature.

In a text display, non-text characters are shown as follows:

(LF) = Linefeed, aka Newline (hex 0A) (CR) = Carriage Return (hex 0D) (HT) = Horizontal Tab (hex 09) (00) = Hexadecimal 00

Uses

Try entering http://www.amazon.com as the URL in the form above, and select the auto-follow-location option. You'll see that Amazon redirects you twice while setting various cookies.

Note that if you aim your browser at http://www.amazon.com, the exchange might be somewhat different. If any amazon.com cookie values were already set on your system, your browser would send them back, and Amazon would respond accordingly (greeting you by name, for instance).

HttpView can be useful if you want to see the source text of JavaScript (.js) and Cascading Style Sheet (.css) files.

Source Code

My HTTP Viewer is useful as is, and demonstrates the quality of work that consulting clients can expect from me. Sorry, but the source code is not available -- I give away a lot of material on my site, but not everything!

Other Tools

See my home page for other summaries and demos: APL, REXX, XEDIT, KEDIT, Perl, HTML, RGB Colors, HTTP Cookies, Email Forms, CGI Environment Variables, Server Side Includes, etc...

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Last updated 12 September 2011

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