The HTTP::Headers class encapsulates HTTP-style message headers.
The headers consist of attribute-value pairs also called fields, which
may be repeated, and which are printed in a particular order. The
field names are cases insensitive.
Instances of this class are usually created as member variables of the
HTTP::Request and HTTP::Response classes, internal to the
library.
Get or set the value of one or more header fields. The header field
name ($field) is not case sensitive. To make the life easier for perl
users who wants to avoid quoting before the => operator, you can use
'_' as a replacement for '-' in header names.
The header() method accepts multiple ($field => $value) pairs, which
means that you can update several fields with a single invocation.
The $value argument may be a plain string or a reference to an array
of strings for a multi-valued field. If the $value is provided as
undef then the field is removed. If the $value is not given, then
that header field will remain unchanged.
The old value (or values) of the last of the header fields is returned.
If no such field exists undef will be returned.
A multi-valued field will be returned as separate values in list
context and will be concatenated with ``, '' as separator in scalar
context. The HTTP spec (RFC 2616) promise that joining multiple
values in this way will not change the semantic of a header field, but
in practice there are cases like old-style Netscape cookies (see
the HTTP::Cookies manpage) where ``,'' is used as part of the syntax of a single
field value.
Examples:
$header->header(MIME_Version => '1.0',
User_Agent => 'My-Web-Client/0.01');
$header->header(Accept => "text/html, text/plain, image/*");
$header->header(Accept => [qw(text/html text/plain image/*)]);
@accepts = $header->header('Accept'); # get multiple values
$accepts = $header->header('Accept'); # get values as a single string
This will remove all the header fields used to describe the content of
a message. All header field names prefixed with Content- falls
into this category, as well as Allow, Expires and
Last-Modified. RFC 2616 denote these fields as Entity Header
Fields.
The return value is a new HTTP::Headers object that contains the
removed headers only.
Returns the list of distinct names for the fields present in the
header. The field names have case as suggested by HTTP spec, and the
names are returned in the recommended ``Good Practice'' order.
In scalar context return the number of distinct field names.
Apply a subroutine to each header field in turn. The callback routine
is called with two parameters; the name of the field and a single
value (a string). If a header field is multi-valued, then the
routine is called once for each value. The field name passed to the
callback routine has case as suggested by HTTP spec, and the headers
will be visited in the recommended ``Good Practice'' order.
Any return values of the callback routine are ignored. The loop can
be broken by raising an exception (die), but the caller of scan()
would have to trap the exception itself.
Return the header fields as a formatted MIME header. Since it
internally uses the scan method to build the string, the result
will use case as suggested by HTTP spec, and it will follow
recommended ``Good Practice'' of ordering the header fields. Long header
values are not folded.
The optional $eol parameter specifies the line ending sequence to
use. The default is ``\n''. Embedded ``\n'' characters in header field
values will be substituted with this line ending sequence.
The most frequently used headers can also be accessed through the
following convenience methods. These methods can both be used to read
and to set the value of a header. The header value is set if you pass
an argument to the method. The old header value is always returned.
If the given header did not exist then undef is returned.
Methods that deal with dates/times always convert their value to system
time (seconds since Jan 1, 1970) and they also expect this kind of
value when the header value is set.
These header fields are used to make a request conditional. If the requested
resource has (or has not) been modified since the time specified in this field,
then the server will return a 304 Not Modified response instead of
the document itself.
The Content-Type header field indicates the media type of the message
content. E.g.:
$h->content_type('text/html');
The value returned will be converted to lower case, and potential
parameters will be chopped off and returned as a separate value if in
an array context. If there is no such header field, then the empty
string is returned. This makes it safe to do the following:
if ($h->content_type eq 'text/html') {
# we enter this place even if the real header value happens to
# be 'TEXT/HTML; version=3.0'
...
}
The Content-Encoding header field is used as a modifier to the
media type. When present, its value indicates what additional encoding mechanism has been applied to the resource.
The natural language(s) of the intended audience for the message
content. The value is one or more language tags as defined by RFC
1766. Eg. ``no'' for some kind of Norwegian and ``en-US'' for English the
way it is written in the US.
The title of the document. In libwww-perl this header will be
initialized automatically from the <TITLE>...</TITLE> element
of HTML documents. This header is no longer part of the HTTP
standard.
This header should contain an Internet e-mail address for the human
user who controls the requesting user agent. The address should be
machine-usable, as defined by RFC822. E.g.:
$h->from('King Kong <king@kong.com>');
This header is no longer part of the HTTP standard.
Used to specify the address (URI) of the document from which the
requested resource address was obtained.
The ``Free On-line Dictionary of Computing'' as this to say about the
word referer:
<World-Wide Web> A misspelling of "referrer" which
somehow made it into the {HTTP} standard. A given {web
page}'s referer (sic) is the {URL} of whatever web page
contains the link that the user followed to the current
page. Most browsers pass this information as part of a
request.
(1998-10-19)
By popular demand referrer exists as an alias for this method so you
can avoid this misspelling in your programs and still send the right
thing on the wire.
When setting the referrer, this method removes the fragment from the
given URIif it is present, as mandated by RFC2616. Note that
the removal does not happen automatically if using the header(),
push_header() or init_header() methods to set the referrer.
This header must be included as part of a 401 Unauthorized response.
The field value consist of a challenge that indicates the
authentication scheme and parameters applicable to the requested URI.
This method is used to get or set an authorization header that use the
``Basic Authentication Scheme''. In array context it will return two
values; the user name and the password. In scalar context it will
return ``uname:password'' as a single string value.
When used to set the header value, it expects two arguments. E.g.:
$h->authorization_basic($uname, $password);
The method will croak if the $uname contains a colon ':'.
The header field name spelling is normally canonicalized including the
'_' to '-' translation. There are some application where this is not
appropriate. Prefixing field names with ':' allow you to force a
specific spelling. For example if you really want a header field name
to show up as foo_bar instead of ``Foo-Bar'', you might set it like
this:
$h->header(":foo_bar" => 1);
These field names are returned with the ':' intact for
$h->header_field_names and the $h->scan callback, but the colons do
not show in $h->as_string.
