http-headers

Extract and parse headers from an HTTP request or reponse.

Converts:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2014 07:19:27 GMT
Connection: keep-alive
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

Hello World

To this:

{ date: 'Tue, 10 Jun 2014 07:19:27 GMT',
  connection: 'keep-alive',
  'transfer-encoding': 'chunked' }

Features:

• Auto-detects and ignores HTTP start-line if present
• Auto-detects and ignores body if present
• Fully RFC 2068 compliant (please open an issue if you find a discrepancy)
• Support multi-line headers (lines will be joined with a space)
• Support repeating headers (values will be joined with , )

Installation

npm install http-headers

Usage

var net = require('net')
var httpHeaders = require('http-headers')

// create TCP server
net.createServer(function (c) {
  var buffers = []
  c.on('data', buffers.push.bind(buffers))
  c.on('end', function () {
    var data = Buffer.concat(buffers)

    // parse incoming data as an HTTP request and extra HTTP headers
    console.log('Request headers:', httpHeaders(data))
  })
}).listen(8080)

http.ServerReponse support

If given an instance of http.ServerResponse, the reponse headers is automatically extracted, parsed and returned:

var http = require('http')
var httpHeaders = require('http-headers')

http.createServer(function (req, res) {
  res.end('Hello World')
  console.log('Response headers:', httpHeaders(res))
}).listen(8080)

Why?

If you've ever needed to log or in another way access the headers sent to the client on a http.ServerResponse in Node.js, you know it's not as easy as with the http.IncomingMessage headers (which you just access via request.headers['content-type']).

Response headers are not directly available on the response object. Instead all headers are preprocessed as a string on the private response._header property and needs to be processed in order to be available as an object.

This module makes the task super simple.

API

The http-headers module exposes a single parser function:

httpHeaders([ string | buffer | http.ServerReponse ])

The module returns a JavaScript object with each element representing a parsed header. All header names are lowercased.

License

MIT