HttpServletRequest and getHeader(): How to handle case insensitive headers properly?

Question

Since I discovered that HTTP headers are case-insensive according to the RFC, i was wondering how I can access HTTP headers in a case-insensitive way with Servlets. There is a #getHeader(String) method to obtain a header but it turned out that this method treats the header fields case sensitive.

Is there a "case insensitive" way to get header fields ? Or do i have to iterate over all the header fields to find the header field I was looking for ?

Answer 1

Which servlet container are you using? The docs for getHeader(String) state:

The header name is case insensitive.

so it sounds like a bug in the container you're using.

Answer 2

tomcat 8.0.24 impl of getHeader delegates to 'org.apache.tomcat.util.http.MimeHeaders' which eventually calls this method below which in turn does case insensitive check

313  public MessageBytes getValue(String name) {