Class BaseHTTPRequestHandler

Lib/http/server.py:199–703

HTTP request handler base class. The following explanation of HTTP serves to guide you through the code as well as to expose any misunderstandings I may have about HTTP (so you don't need to read the code to figure out I'm wrong :-). HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) is an ext

class BaseHTTPRequestHandler(socketserver.StreamRequestHandler):

    """HTTP request handler base class.

    The following explanation of HTTP serves to guide you through the
    code as well as to expose any misunderstandings I may have about
    HTTP (so you don't need to read the code to figure out I'm wrong
    :-).

    HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) is an extensible protocol on
    top of a reliable stream transport (e.g. TCP/IP).  The protocol
    recognizes three parts to a request:

    1. One line identifying the request type and path
    2. An optional set of RFC-822-style headers
    3. An optional data part

    The headers and data are separated by a blank line.

    The first line of the request has the form

    <command> <path> <version>

    where <command> is a (case-sensitive) keyword such as GET or POST,
    <path> is a string containing path information for the request,
    and <version> should be the string "HTTP/1.0" or "HTTP/1.1".
    <path> is encoded using the URL encoding scheme (using %xx to signify
    the ASCII character with hex code xx).

    The specification specifies that lines are separated by CRLF but
    for compatibility with the widest range of clients recommends
    servers also handle LF.  Similarly, whitespace in the request line
    is treated sensibly (allowing multiple spaces between components
    and allowing trailing whitespace).

    Similarly, for output, lines ought to be separated by CRLF pairs
    but most clients grok LF characters just fine.

    If the first line of the request has the form

    <command> <path>

    (i.e. <version> is left out) then this is assumed to be an HTTP
    0.9 request; this form has no optional headers and data part and
    the reply consists of just the data.

    The reply form of the HTTP 1.x protocol again has three parts:

    1. One line giving the response code
    2. An optional set of RFC-822-style headers
    3. The data

    Again, the headers and data are separated by a blank line.

    The response code line has the form

    <version> <responsecode> <responsestring>